International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

Fentress and Wickham 1992 describe how poems like the Chanson de Roland used mnemonic techniques which allowed the jongleur or singer of tales to remember and recreate a long epic narrative. Unfortunately, their account depended on a serious misunderstanding of jongleur epic mnemonic technique described by Jean Rychner (1955), a misunderstanding that has pervaded current scholarship (Levy 2004).

Modern scholars are not alone in misunderstanding how a jongleur performed a long poem. Embedded in an epic narrative on Roman history, derived ultimately from Lucan’s Pharsalia but rewritten in Old French epic metrical stanzas (laisses), we find an intriguing case of “copy protection”. The author, Niccolò of Verona, while at the Marquis d’Este’s Ferrara Court in 1343, inserted signature verses in the middle of the poem but made a second hidden copy of these verses in an acrostic extending over 93 stanzas. He tells us that he signed his work because he believed illiterate jongleurs stole (memorized verbatim) other jongleurs’ work, probably on a single hearing, and that they would remove his signature verses but would not know of the existence of acrostic signatures (common in writing) and thus he could preserve his authorial rights. Being a literate poet, Niccolò of Verona would have assumed that jongleuresque epics were memorized. He may have received this impression while observing epic performances (without the aid of books) by Italian cantimbanchi or jongleurs in Franco-Italian. In fact, while memorization is used for some kinds of orally transmitted literature (typically religious works, such as the Vedas, or the Japanese epic Heike Monogatari) such memorization is slow and painstaking, and it is not the technique employed by epic singers of tales who recreate their songs in performance using oral formulaic techniques learned in an apprenticeship that could last decades (Lord 1960).

James Fentress and  Chris Wickham, Social Memory. (New Perspectives on the Past. gen. ed. R.I. Moore) Blackwell, Oxford/Cambridge, 1992.
Jean Rychner  La Chanson de geste, Essai sur l'art épique des jongleurs. PRF 53. Geneva: Droz, 1955.