Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches

By Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen

The number of surviving medieval secular poems attributed to named female authors is small, some of the best known being those of the trobairitz the female troubadours of southern France. However, there is a large body of poetry that constructs a particular textual femininity through the use of the female voice. Some of these poems are by men and a few by women (including the trobairitz); many are anonymous, and often the gender of the poet is unresolvable. A "woman's song" in this sense can be defined as a female-voice poem on the subject of love, typically characterized by simple language, sexual candor, and apparent artlessness.

The chapters in Medieval Woman's Song bring together scholars in a range of disciplines to examine how both men and women contributed to this art form. Without eschewing consideration of authorship, the collection deliberately overturns the long-standing scholarly practice of treating as separate and distinct entities female-voice lyrics composed by men and those composed by women. What is at stake here is less the voice of women themselves than its cultural and generic construction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781512803815

Book preview

Medieval Woman’s Song

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Medieval Woman’s Song

Cross-Cultural Approaches

Edited by

Anne L. Klinck and

Ann Marie Rasmussen

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Medieval woman’s song : cross-cultural approaches / edited by Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen.

p. cm. — (Middle Ages series)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ), discography (p. ), and index.

ISBN 0-8122-3624-6 (alk. paper)

1. Women singers. 2. Women musicians. 3. Vocal music—500–1400—History and criticism. 4. Vocal music—15th century—History and criticism. 5. Music—Social aspects. I. Klinck, Anne Lingard, 1943– II. Rasmussen, Ann Marie. III. Series.

ML82.M45 2001

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction Anne L. Klinck

1. Sappho and Her Daughters: Some Parallels Between Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song

Anne L. Klinck

2. Ides … geomrode giddum: The Old English Female Lament

Pat Belanoff

3. Women’s Performance of the Lyric Before 1500

Susan Boynton

4. Ca no soe joglaresa: Women and Music in Medieval Spain’s Three Cultures

Judith R. Cohen

5. Feminine Voices in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo

Esther Corral

6. Sewing like a Girl: Working Women in the chansons de toile

E. Jane Burns

7. Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

8. The Conception of Female Roles in the Woman’s Song of Reinmar and the Comtessa de Dia

Ingrid Kasten

9. Reason and the Female Voice in Walther von der Vogelweide’s Poetry

Ann Marie Rasmussen

10. Ventriloquisms: When Maidens Speak in English Songs, c. 1300–1550

Judith M. Bennett

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Anne L. Klinck

It is now twenty years since the publication of Vox Feminae,¹ an essay collection which gave currency in English-language scholarship to the term woman’s song—the kind of female-voice love-lyric long familiar to French and German medievalists as chanson de femme or Frauenlied. That volume also broadened the study of woman’s songs, previously focused mainly on Continental poems, to include Middle English and Celtic materials. The editors of this new collection feel that another survey of the subject, directed at the English reader, is timely. The present book reflects the developments of the last two decades, especially in feminist scholarship, and also addresses another important issue, the musical performance of woman’s songs, a subject too often ignored.² Our focus is on voice rather than authorship, that is, on textual femininity, present in all the poems examined here, but constructed in various ways. Most of the essays included are new; those by Matilda Bruckner and Ingrid Kasten are reprinted here because they represent major contributions to the study of medieval woman’s song. Although the book concentrates on the literature of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and on texts dating between A.D. 900 and 1500, it also gives consideration to the affinities of European woman’s song with Jewish and Arabic literature, and to parallels with woman’s songs in the ancient world.

Because our anthology focuses on poems in which women speak, we include essays on both female-voice and female-authored love-lyric, categories which have traditionally divided the study of medieval woman’s song. The number of surviving medieval secular poems attributed to named female authors in the medieval sources is small, some of the best known being those of the trobairitz or women troubadours of southern France. Not all woman-authored poetry is woman’s song in our sense, but, as we shall see, there are good reasons for including the trobairitz within this category. However, many examples of woman’s-voice medieval lyric are extant, sometimes anonymous and sometimes authored by men.

In fact, woman’s song is a literary type, too loosely defined to be termed a genre.³ Constructed in a supposedly popular rather than courtly mode (we will return to this issue below), poems of this type were composed for oral delivery, and most of them were sung with musical accompaniment. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases the musical notation has not survived. Woman’s song is characterized by strophic structure, often with repeated lines or phrases creating parallelism or refrain; simplicity of vocabulary and syntax; lack of narrative and descriptive detail; emotional, often exclamatory language; focus on certain natural objects—water, trees, birds, animals—which assume a symbolic function; and a strong physical element in the speaker’s account of herself and her feelings. The mode of woman’s song is frequently signaled at the opening by grammatical markers of feminine gender, and by an apostrophe to the speaker’s mother, lover, or confidante(s). The theme always relates to love, typically, but not universally, in terms of loss or longing. These features apply especially to monologue, but they also appear in dialogue, and in narrative-framed speech.

The distinction between female-authored and female-voice woman’s song is a vexed one, though it is still respected by most scholarship. Defining the type by textual rather than authorial femininity allows us to include poems authored by known men and women, as well as many anonymous works. Although where known authorial gender can be very significant (see Kasten’s essay below), the classification of woman’s songs by the femininity of the text rather than that of the author is an approach particularly appropriate to the medieval period, when many texts are anonymous, the attribution of others is conventional and sometimes dubious, and the persistence of oral delivery makes the audience often more conscious of performance than authorship.⁴ Thus, the identity of a male author might be submerged in that of a female performer. It is, of course, possible that a woman’s song might be performed by a man, which would add an element of irony. But the adoption of the mode of woman’s song is, as Pierre Bec said, un choix typologique⁵ that may be made by either a man or a woman. The primacy of the text, rather than the author, has been a preoccupation of poststructuralist approaches to literature.⁶ Focusing on textual femininity avoids the biographical fallacy on the one hand, and, on the other, the nihilism which concludes that in a system dominated by men there can be no such thing as a woman’s voice (cf. Bruckner below). This approach also sidesteps the ultimately insoluble problem of which texts of doubtful ascription were actually authored by women.⁷ Some feminist scholars have urged the recuperation of anonymous female-voice lyrics into the canon of women’s texts.⁸ Others have insisted on the essentially feminine discourse of woman’s songs regardless of their authorship.⁹ In the present book, however, we see these characteristic features as evidence not of an essential biological femininity, but of a persistent convention.

The earliest investigations of woman’s songs were concerned largely with the origins of European lyric. Although most extant medieval woman’s songs are attributable to male authors, there was a tendency to trace the type back to preliterate songs actually composed by women. Goethe, Jakob Grimm, and others saw in the early German and Balkan Frauenlieder and Frauenstrophen the traces of the älteste Volkspoesie.¹⁰ Wilhelm Scherer believed that some of the male-attributed Frauenlieder in Lachmann’s Minnesangs Frühling collection were in fact originally composed by women.¹¹ Alfred Jeanroy and Gaston Paris traced the whole of European lyric back to the dance songs of young girls at their spring-time celebrations. It was Jeanroy who, in his 1889 study of the origins of French lyric, formulated the first real definition of woman’s song. For him, it was un monologue de femme, specifically, the utterance of a young girl, on the subject of love, and usually sad.¹² He hypothesized that originally these songs were composed spontaneously by the young girls themselves to accompany their dances (445),¹³ but assumed that all extant versions were literary and of male authorship (299). While his book focuses principally on French and Occitan poetry, Jeanroy also considers Portuguese, German, and Italian. Gaston Paris expanded Jeanroy’s hypothesis, and traced a line of descent from the Floralia of Venus, through the medieval Kalenda Maya,¹⁴ to May songs in modern times (Fetes de mai, 611). This theory seems probable enough,¹⁵ though its exclusion of other sources and its assumption of the historical priority of woman’s songs are more dubious. The characteristics of the Frauenlied were explored further by Theodor Frings in a number of studies, notably his 1949 monograph Minnesinger und Troubadours.¹⁶ For Frings, too, the woman’s song is chronologically prior to courtly poetry, but at the same time he stresses the universality of the type, giving examples ranging from ancient Greece to China.

Even though Jeanroy himself admitted that no genuinely oral and popular examples survived, the view of woman’s songs as popular, in contrast to courtly lyric, has persisted. Pierre Bec redefined Jeanroy’s terms, preferring to speak of a registre popularisant (as opposed to aristocratisant)¹⁷ to which the chanson de femme belonged. Bec thus suggests composition in a popular style, although not necessarily in a popular context. He also insists that the chanson de femme is not merely pre-courtoise but also para-courtoise and post-courtoise (Lyrique française, 1:61). As he defines it, the chanson de femme embraces a variety of more circumscribed genres, especially the chanson d’ami (young girl’s song about her feelings for a lover), chanson de malmariée, chanson de toile sung to accompany needlework, and the alba, as well as the pastourelle (to some extent), and various types of dance songs. We shall see these genres reflected in the examples which follow. Bec subdivides the chanson d’ami further into the chanson de délaissée and chanson de départie. Perhaps because poets and audiences were more conscious of these narrower forms, no real equivalent to the modern comprehensive term existed in the Middle Ages. The closest is the Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amigo (chanson d’ami), contrasting with the male-voice cantiga de amor.¹⁸ Modern scholars have tended to exclude from the category of woman’s song those genres which they regard as aristocratic or courtly, or in which the woman’s voice is only reported, but there is much disagreement about particular cases.¹⁹ Some types of woman’s songs are specific to particular cultural backgrounds. Thus, the marinha (sea-song) and barcarola (boat-song) uttered by a woman waiting for her lover by the shore, are characteristic subgenres among the cantigas de amigo, while the romaria, set in the context of a pilgrimage to a local shrine, only appears in this Galician-Portuguese group. The chanson de toile is exclusive to northern France. But most of the genres recur: in the various Romance vernaculars, in German, in Middle English, and in medieval Latin.

The essentially popular nature of these various genres is in fact highly problematic. Although many songs are anonymous, many, especially the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo and the German Frauenlieder, are attributed to named poets, often members of the upper class, and thus popular neither in authorship nor in audience. Considering these complications, Ulrich Mölk proposed to make a distinction between popular and elevated poetry (volkstümlich /gehoben), instead of the usual popular/courtly antithesis (Die frühen romanischen Frauenlieder, 69–70). He advocates stripping woman’s song of its typological ambiguities and aura of Romantic theories about origins, and defines it as a love-song in a popular register, in which the woman’s perspective is realised as monologue, dialogue, or reported speech (88). This definition has the advantage of including poems in which the woman’s voice figures prominently but not exclusively.²⁰ However, it fails to solve the problem inherent in designating poetry popular—whether by origin or by register. What is characteristic about woman’s songs is not their rusticity but their artless posture—whether spontaneous or not. Also, they retain much that is oral and traditional in origin. Some of the genres involve a rural setting—like the pastourelle with its encounter between knight and shepherd girl. Others do not: the action of the chanson de toile, for instance, is located among aristocratic women in the upper room of a castle.²¹ Finally, the popular/courtly dichotomy ignores the evidence of the trobairitz, who were aristocratic poets.

Characterizing a particular mode as popular or even popularizing implies a set of questionable assumptions: that level of complexity, degree of sincerity, capacity for sensitivity, etc. are somehow correlated—in either a parallel or an inverse way—with social class.²² Undoubtedly woman’s songs as a type are marked by an appearance of simplicity and directness, but these qualities need not be regarded as especially popular. Nor is the sexual frankness which characterizes some of these lyrics any more popular than aristocratic. Clearly, too, woman’s songs are not generically popular as distinct from learned, since some of them are composed in medieval Latin and others show the influence of learned sources. Therefore, we suggest abandoning a distinction based ultimately on Romantic notions about the folk and involving unnecessary class implications, and defining woman’s song as a female-voice poem on the subject of love, typically characterized by its simple language, its sexual candor, and its apparent artlessness. These criteria emphasize textual rather than genetic femininity (to use Bec’s terminology, "Trobairitz," 235–36), permitting us to accommodate compositions that may be aristocratic in origin, complex in intent—and authored by either men or women. The mode of woman’s song presents a gender stereotype, to be sure, but taken up in multifarious ways by different poets who work within the stereotype, transform it, or subvert it.

Although Romantic critics saw at the basis of European lyric a tradition of oral woman’s songs, they assumed that none of these ur-texts were actually preserved in writing. Probably because of the Continental bias of most studies, the heroic woman’s songs of Anglo-Saxon England and of early Ireland and Scandinavia were left out of consideration. However, the theories of Jeanroy and Frings seemed to gain support from the publication by S. M. Stern in 1948 of a series of recently deciphered lyric fragments in early Spanish,²³ some of which, going back to the first half of the eleventh century, antedated the troubadours and provided evidence for a native Iberian tradition of popular lyric. The kharjas (literally, exits), lyric codas to longer and more elaborate poems, muwashshahas, in Arabic and Hebrew, are usually, like the Frauenlieder and cantigas de amigo, passionate declarations of a woman’s love. Their outspoken sensuality may be attributable in part to a performance context: if the muwashshahas were sung by young women for an audience of men, the kharjas would provide contrast to the male-voice poem that preceded them and link it to the physical presence of the singer. Although the songs bespeak a native tradition, they must also be, at least to some extent, the product of Middle Eastern influence, among the mixed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim population of early Spain.

Earlier even than the kharjas, and important for the history of woman’s song, are the two Old English poems Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament, preserved in a late tenth-century manuscript, but probably at least a hundred years older.²⁴ With the possible exception of one or two Irish poems, they are the earliest woman’s songs in a medieval European vernacular. These two poems are enigmatic, but generally recognized as love-laments uttered by women.²⁵ Unlike the other texts we are considering, they are not strophic in form—though their use of thematic repetition shows a strophic tendency. They are lyrics not in a formal sense but by virtue of their intensely personal emotion and their focus on the lyric moment. First recognized as Frauenlieder by Kemp Malone in 1962, they have subsequently been related to medieval Latin woman’s songs, and to the woman’s song more generally.²⁶ Peter Dronke has seen in Wulf and Eadwacer one of those winileodas (songs to a friend, i.e., lover) which nuns were forbidden to compose, in a well-known Carolingian edict of 789.²⁷ It is likely that both the Old English poems, but especially Wulf and Eadwacer, which departs significantly from the vocabulary and metrics of Germanic heroic verse, were influenced by songs now lost. This poem mixes longer and shorter lines, at times with the effect of refrain: They will take him if he comes into their troop / unalike are our lots (lines 2–3, 7–8).²⁸ The speaker longs for her lover and remembers an embrace (his or someone else’s) that gave her both joy and pain. The natural setting, so genial in later medieval love-poetry, is here entirely forbidding: island fastnesses surrounded by fen, bloodthirsty men lying in wait, rainy weather, a wolf carrying off a young child. Wulf’s background of tribal warfare links it with the laments of Deirdre (Irish) and Guthrun (Norse) rather than with the Continental woman’s songs, but its physicality and its passionate tone are clearly within the same mode.

Like the kharjas and the Old English poems, the medieval Latin woman’s songs are also conditioned by a distinct social context, in this case, the clerics who formed an international educated elite. Their recreational verse was learned, sometimes passionate and sometimes frivolous, often ironic. It has been argued by Anne Schotter that many medieval Latin woman’s songs put women down, making fun of them in a language they could not understand.²⁹ This observation may well be true of Huc usque me miseram in the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana, a chanson de délaissée:

Until now, poor wretched me,

I’d concealed things well,

And loved cunningly.

Finally my secret’s out,

For my belly’s swollen up

Showing I’m pregnant and soon due.

On one side my mother beats me,

On the other my father yells at me,

Both of them are hard on me.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If I go outdoors,

Everybody looks at me

As if I were a monster.

When they see my abdomen,

One nudges the other,

And they’re silent until I’ve gone past.

(Huc usque, me miseram! / rem bene celaveram / et amavi callide. / Res mea tandem patuit, / nam venter intumuit, / partus instat gravide. / Hinc mater me verberat, / hinc pater improperat, / ambo tractant aspere. / ………… / Cum foris egredior, / a cunctis inspicior, / quasi monstrum fuerim. / Cum vident hunc uterum, / alter pulsat alterum, / silent, dum transierim.) (CB 126) ³⁰

The use of the learned language here, and the detached clerical audience implied by it, certainly contributes to the ironizing of the girl’s plight.

Sometimes the woman’s voice in medieval Latin lyric expresses an uninhibited sexuality, as in Veni dilectissime from the Cambridge Songs, an eleventh-century collection:

Come darling,

To visit me, your pleasure.

I’m dying of longing,

I’m yearning for love.

If you come with your key,

You shall quickly enter.

(Veni dilectissime / gratam me invisere. / In languore pereo, / venerem desidero. / Si cum clave / veneris, / mox intrare poteris.) (CC 49) ³¹

In the barcarola Nam languens, from the same manuscript, the woman’s longing and vulnerability are evoked by the winter world through which she moves:

For longing with love of you

I arose at dawn,

And went barefoot

Through the snow and cold,

And scanned the waste sea,

If perhaps your windblown

Sails I might discern

Or glimpse the prow of your ship.

(Nam languens amore tuo, / consurrexi diluculo, / perrexique pedes nuda / per nives et frigora, / atque maria rimabar mesta, / si forte ventivola / vela cernerem / aut frontem navis conspicerem.) (CC 14A)³²

The Song of Songs is clearly an influence here (see Klinck below), while the speaker’s situation in Nam languens recalls the plight of various legendary abandoned women in Ovid’s Heroides (Heroines).³³

A significant body of poetry which has been studied as women’s writing but not usually as woman’s song is found in the songs of fin’amor by the trobairitz, who composed in Provence between about 1170 and 1260. Although these poems, because of their aristocratic origins, have traditionally been excluded from the corpus of woman’s songs,³⁴ various scholars have noticed that these lyrics in fact participate in the mode of the chanson de femme. Frings saw the Comtessa de Dia’s A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu no volria (It falls to me to sing of what I would not wish) as a development of the Frauenlied under the influence of the canso, the troubadour song of courtly love (Frauen-strophen und Frauenlied, 26). Dronke comments on the passionate language and sexual boldness of the Comtessa’s Estat ai eu en greu cossirier (I’ve been in sore distress) in his discussion of woman’s songs (Medieval Lyric, 105–6). Bec regards the poems of the trobairitz as mediating between the grand chant courtois and the chanson de femme ("Trobairitz, 261). And Matilda Bruckner notes that the incantatory quality" in Tibors’s fragmentary canso "recalls with particular insistence the kinds of effects achieved in the cantigas de amigo."³⁵

The trobairitz combine the apparent artlessness and the sexual frankness of woman’s song with the ceremony and the savoir faire of courtly canso. The Comtessa de Dia and Na Castelloza proclaim their right to woo, and they seek a lover whose accomplishments will be a credit to them. When the Comtessa speaks of her intelligence and her worth (A chantar m’er 5), she speaks as the aristocratic lady, the domna, but when she wants to be her lover’s pillow and have him in her husband’s place (Estat ai eu 12, 21–22) she is using the same frankly erotic language as the girl in an Italian woman’s song who tells her mother she wants her lover to be closer to me than my shift.³⁶ The trobairitz poems situate themselves both within and outside the boundaries of the male-voice canso. They adopt the conventional values of ennoblement through the service of love, fidelity to the beloved, and secrecy in love, but they combine rather than invert the roles of favor-bestowing lady and wooing, striving lover. Also, they usually adopt a simpler diction and metrics,³⁷ and, whereas the persona of male poet-lover often seems more preoccupied with displaying his talents than pursuing his love, the female persona, though conscious of her own worth, is more absorbed in the love-relationship.³⁸ While the trobairitz poems make a substantial, though still very small, contribution to Provençal lyric,³⁹ relatively few woman’s songs of the kind traditionally called popular are preserved in Occitan,⁴⁰ probably because of the dominance of courtly lyric in that language. Nevertheless, Occitan does offer some examples, mainly anonymous, of lively and often audacious poems in the mode of dance songs and chansons de malmariée, notably Coindeta sui: si cum n’ai greu cossire (I’m pretty—and I’ve sore distress for it), which is both.⁴¹

The famous A l’entrada del tens clar (At the Beginning of the Fair Season), celebrating the May Queen (in this case actually the April Queen), is a rare example of the spring songs by which Jeanroy and Frings set so much store:

The king is coming from away—eya!

To interrupt the dance—eya!

For he’s in a panic—eya!

That someone might run away

With the April Queen.

Away, away with you, jealous ones!

Leave us free, leave us free,

To dance together, dance together.

But she wants him not at all—eya!

For she’s no need of an old man—eya!

But a lively bachelor—eya!

Who knows well how to charm

A sexy lady.

Away, etc.

(Lo reis i ven d’autra part, eya, / per la dansa destorbar, eya, / qu’el es en cremetar, eya, / que om no li voill’emblar / la regin’avrilloza. / A la vi’, a la via, jelos, / laissaz nos, laissaz nos / ballar entre nos, entre nos. / Qu’ela n’a sonh de viellart, eya, / mais d’un leugier bachelar, eya, / qui ben sapcha solaçar / la domna savoroza. / A la vi’, etc.)⁴²

A l’entrada seems to be designed to accompany a mimetic dance. This song, one of those for which a melody is preserved, is probably in an oral tradition, and may be derived from originally extemporaneous songs. Its escapism from the male-dominated order is significant: as an attack on jealous husbands it is merely playful, but it is associated with festivities which allow a kind of licence not normally tolerated—a sort of safety-valve, and reflective of the spirit of carnival in the Bakhtinian sense.⁴³

A l’entrada also shows affinities with the malmariée, a type much better attested in the poetry of northern France. Typically, the genre features a pretty young woman married to an impotent old man, whom she delights in cuckolding, as in the rondeau Fi maris de vostre amour by Adam de la Halle in the thirteenth century:

Fie, husband, on your love,

For I’ve a lover!

He’s handsome, cuts a fine figure.

Fie, husband, on your love.

He serves me night and day.

That’s why I love him so.

Fie husband, on your love,

For I’ve a lover!

(Fi, maris, de vostre amour, / car j’ai ami! / Biaus est et de noble atour: / fi, maris, de vostre amour! / Il me sert et nuit et jour, / pour che l’aim si. / Fi, maris, de vostre amour, / car j’ai ami!)⁴⁴

The chanson d’ami accommodates more sober tones, occasionally rising to a passionate intensity. In Jherusalem, a young girl cries out against the city which has deprived her of her lover:

Jerusalem, you do me great injury,

For you’ve taken away the one I love most of all.

Know this for sure: I’ll never love you again,

For there’s nothing that so mars my joy;

Very often I sigh and lament over it

So much I nearly turn from God

Who’s driven me out from the great joy I had.

(Jherusalem, grant damage me fais, / qui m’as tolu ce que je plus amoie. / Sachiez de voir ne vos amerai maiz, / quar c’est la rienz dont j’ai plus male joie, / et bien sovent en souspir et pantais, / si qu’a bien pou que vers Deu ne m’irais / qui m’a osté de grant joie ou j’estoie.)⁴⁵

This subgenre of the chanson de croisade may have been created by the Provençal Marcabru’s A la fontana, where the speaker curses King Louis for the same reason.⁴⁶ The chanson de toile assumes an archaizing simplicity, sometimes innocently, as in Bele Erembors, where a maiden convinces her returned lover that she has not forgotten him, and sometimes ironically, as in Bele Yolanz, where, after chastising her daughter for deceiving her husband with a lover, the mother finally says, Suit yourself!⁴⁷

Romance influence is detectable in most German woman’s songs, though certain typical motifs may have arisen independently—like the burgeoning of spring in the following short piece, dated around 1160:

Nothing seems to me so fine and fit to praise

As the bright rose and my man’s love.

The little birds

That sing in the wood make many a heart light.

But if my true love’s away, summer’s joy is nought.

(Mich dunket niht sô guotes noch sô lobesam / sô diu liehte rôse und diu minne mîns man. / diu kleinen vogellîn / diu singent in dem walde, dêst menegem herzen liep. / mir enkome mîn holder geselle, ine hân der sumerwunne niet.) (MF 3, 17, p. 22)

While retaining the directness and economy characteristic of the mode, some of the German Frauenlieder are in fact quite complex. In Der von Kurenberg’s Ich zôch mir einen valken (I trained me a falcon), another very early poem, the far-ranging flight of the once tame bird becomes a metaphysical rather than an erotic symbol:

Since then I’ve seen that falcon in splendid flight,

Trailing silk ribbons from his feet,

His feathers all bright red-gold.

God reunite lovers who long to be at one!

(Sît sach ich den valken schône vliegen, / er vuorte an sînem vuoze sîdîne riemen, / und was im sîn gevidere alrôt guldîn. / got sende sî zesamene, die gelíeb wéllen gerne sîn!) (MF 8,33, p. 25)

Has the lover died? Will the wished-for meeting be in another world? The vision of the apotheosized falcon expresses a yearning in which the gender of the speaker is almost forgotten.⁴⁸ The Frauenlieder of poets like Reinmar der Alte and Walther von der Vogelweide—both discussed later in this volume—can be highly sophisticated. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Tagelieder are not always regarded as woman’s songs. But, as Gale Sigal shows, poems of this type, like Sîne klâwen (see Klinck below) play an important role in developing the feminine perspective.⁴⁹

Italian woman’s songs first appear in the context of the poetry of the Sicilian school at the court of Frederick II, in the mid-thirteenth century. No distinctively Italian form emerges—except in the use of the sonnet for this purpose, but there are examples of the established types, especially the chanson d’ami. The anonymous sonnet Tapina in me (Alas for me!) voices a woman’s grief at the loss of her hawk, which has torn its jesses and flown away—a theme reminiscent of Der von Kurenberg’s poem.⁵⁰ Già mai non mi conforta, by Rinaldo d’Aquino, is a well-known chanson de croisade. The late thirteenth-century Bolognese Mamma, lo temp è venuto (Mother, the time has come) presents a spirited dialogue between a girl and her mother, the former demanding to be allowed to marry the boy with whom she is passionately in love. A la stasgion che’l mondo folglia e fiora (In the season when the world puts out leaves and flowers), by the Compiuta Donzella of Florence, the Italian trobairitz, uses the form of a love-sonnet to protest a betrothal arranged against her will.

The largest body of medieval woman’s song comes from Portugal and Galicia, where native traditions retained their prestige alongside the courtly genres from Occitania, and produced the cantiga de amigo, contrasting with the male-voice cantiga de amor. Whereas the cantiga de amor is more influenced by the Occitan canso, and its language and meter tend to be more elaborate, the cantiga de amigo is characterized by its simple melodiousness, with frequent repetition, parallelistic structure, and refrain. Most of the cantigas de amigo are authored by known, male, poets—who also exercised their talents in the cantiga de amor. The female voice here is innocent and virginal, unlike the sexually experienced voice of many woman’s songs. Nevertheless, there is a markedly sensual element. Thus, in the little cameo Cabelos, los meus cabelos, by Johan Zorro, the beautiful long, loose hair which the king desires is a metonymy for the girl herself, and her virginity (see Corral below). Another common motif is the spring, to which the girl comes to wash clothing, or her hair, and where she encounters her lover. The shrine of a saint is also a typical locale, as is the seashore, where turbulent waves symbolize the girl’s emotions. The two are combined in Mendinho’s Sedia-m’eu na ermida de San Simion (I was at the sanctuary of St. Simion). The characteristics of the cantigas de amigo are continued in the Spanish villancicos, preserved in manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but very possibly of earlier provenance.⁵¹

English woman’s songs are for the most part later than their Romance and German analogues. The Middle English examples are remote from their Old English antecedents, and clearly influenced by Continental models. A favorite theme—discussed by Judith Bennett, below—is the girl who has been seduced by a clerk. One wonders whether, like the Latin poems of this type, texts like this were composed for and enjoyed by a clerical audience. But, though there may be the same knowing humor, the treatment is much more nuanced.⁵² The difference may be attributable to the poets’ greater capacity for subtlety in their own vernacular, and at the same time to its greater naturalism and sincerity. The poems range from the wittily wanton—

Ser John ys taken in my mouse-trappe:

Fayne wold I have hem bothe nyght and day.

He gropith so nyslye a-bought my lape,

I have no pore to say him nay!

to the pathetic—

Jankyn at the Angnus beryt þe pax brede,

He twynkelid, but sayd nowt, and on myn fot he trede.

Benedicamus Domino, Cryst fro schame me schylde.

Deo gracias þerto—alas, I go with chylde!⁵³

In this second example, the impersonal quotations from the Latin mass throw into relief the urgent English words that convey the girl’s sharp fear for her future.

The preceding survey should give some sense of both the variety and the coherence of medieval woman’s song. In the analyses which follow, we offer a range of points of view. Anne Klinck looks at the manifestations of woman’s song from ancient times on, showing how, though the mode may be ultimately attributable to male fantasy, in ancient Greece as in medieval Europe it could be adapted by sophisticated poets—male and female—for their own particular agendas. Pat Belanoff examines the two Old English poems, seeing in them an intensity of focus on the present moment, the impossibility of consolation, and a marginalized voice which cannot attain harmony because it is marginalized. Susan Boynton considers the question of whether medieval women actually composed music, and concludes that the distinction between women performing songs by men and women singing their own songs is a problematic binary that needs to be reexamined. Judith Cohen assesses women’s roles in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Spain, tracing some parallels with contemporary oral tradition. Esther Corral offers a morphology of the femininity created by the male-authored Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo. Jane Burns sees love in the Old French chansons de toile as working like needles through cloth, pulling desirous partners into mutual embrace. Matilda Bruckner examines the individuality of the women troubadours, with particular reference to the Comtessa de Dia and Na Castelloza. Ingrid Kasten compares the assertiveness of the Comtessa with the timid womanhood depicted in the Frauenlieder of the German Reinmar der Alte. Ann Marie Rasmussen focuses on Walther von der Vogelweide’s construction of the discerning lofty