Review

Author(s): Craig Wright

Review by: Craig Wright
Source: Speculum, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 185-186
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863887
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 Reviews 185

poets as Du Bellay, Baudelaire, and Mallarme. While the fourteenth and especially the

fifteenth centuries certainly are insufficiently appreciated and all too rarely taught, it

should not be necessary to justify one's chosen object of study to quite this extent,

especially given the renewed interest in late-medieval French literature in the last twenty

years or so. There is of course nothing wrong with establishing a critical context for the

reading of the late-medieval corpus. But once the context has been established and the

new approach defined, Johnson's readings of texts should really be allowed to speak for

themselves. It is here, rather than in an ever-recurring dialogue with the ghosts of critics

past, that one is convinced of the literary merit and the overall interest of late-medieval

poetry and its relevance to the poetry of the sixteenth century.

This drawback, however, does nothing to obscure the validity of Johnson's readings

and his conclusions concerning the important role of rhyme and meter, the aesthetics

of repetition and variation, and the strong element of play with linguistic, literary, and

social conventions that characterize late-medieval poetry. Scholars of both medieval and

Renaissance literature will find much of value in Johnson's study, which sheds light on

a little-known corpus of texts and outlines a fruitful means of reading and appreciating

them on their own terms. His book additionally helps to illuminate the relationship

between medieval and Renaissance poetics, identifying features of the poetic tradition

that links the poets of the Pleiade to their predecessors in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries.

SYLVIA HUOT, Northern Illinois University

WALTER H. KEMP, Burgundian Court Song in the Time of Binchois: The Anonymous "Chan-

sons" ofEl Escorial, MS V.III.24. (Oxford Monographs on Music.) New York and Oxford:

Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xvii, 157; tables, musical exam-

ples. $49.95.

In this slim volume Walter Kemp has, in fact, written two very brief and substantive

books. The first (part 1) deals exclusively with the music of the Burgundian chanson,

while the second (part 2) explores more broadly the question of the literary traditions

of the chanson lyric as well as the role of the art song within Burgundian court society.

Kemp does not treat the totality of the repertoire of the Burgundian chanson but instead

concentrates his attention on a single central Burgundian manuscript, the important

chansonnier Escorial V.III.24 (known as Escorial A). Escorial A, dated 1430-45 and

preserving sixty-two songs, is crucial to any investigation of the courtly song because it

is one of the few sources that can be securely placed in the Burgundian orbit and because

it is dominated by works of Gilles Binchois (ca. 1400-1460), the principal Burgundian

court composer.

Let the general reader be forewarned that part 1, which may be the more valuable of

the two, is for musicologists only. It presupposes a thorough familiarity with the musical

repertoire, stylistic influences, notational practices, and performance traditions of the

period. Kemp's aim in this opening half of the book is not to describe the Burgundian

chanson generally but rather to establish stylistic criteria by which the thirty-four anon-

ymous pieces in Escorial A might be attributed to specific composers. By focusing on

the chansons of Binchois, he posits what he believes are six characteristics of the "musical

fingerprint" of this primary figure. While the stylistic features are not always as clear-

cut and mutually exclusive as Kemp may argue, nonetheless his rigorously systematic

approach leads to convincing results. In the end the reader feels confident that the

fourteen chansons that the author adds to the Binchois canon do, in fact, belong there.

Part 2 begins with an attempt to situate the Burgundian chanson in the artistic history

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 186 Reviews

of Western Europe. To set the stage, Kemp attempts to answer the questions "what was

Burgundy?" and "what was Burgundian music?" Unfortunately, there is little here that

is new (nothing beyond the solid historiography of Richard Vaughan) and some that is

confusing. How can the Burgundian chanson represent a "welding together of the col-

lective achievements of various national styles" and, at the same time, be a force that

led to "the gradual fission of distinct idioms within European composition"? Indeed,

the notion that Burgundian art, as symbolized by the courtly song, was the cultural zone

in which was fought a centuries-long conflict between French and Hapsburg political

interests is a central theme of this book. Thus we are urged in the conclusion to believe

that the "international crafts which fused to form Burgundian style became analogous

to the fissions of political powers in Western Europe up to 1914." How a fusion can be

analogous to a fission is unclear. Perhaps the confusion on this important point is the

result of poor copyediting. What is certain is that the Burgundian chanson was a synthesis

of several national styles-including Flemish, which gets short shrift here-a force for

harmony and unity in both the musical and the political spheres of human activity. More

compelling is the following chapter, "Chivalric Humanism and the Chanson," the central

thesis being that in its poetic forms, language, and images, as well as its societal function,

the Burgundian chanson looked backward to the Middle Ages rather than forward to

the Renaissance.

The conclusion of Burgundian Court Song attempts a synthesis of parts 1 and 2 by

arguing that the court chanson is a transitional artifact, medieval in its literary tradition

but of the Renaissance in regard to its musical style. But in truth the real precursors of

high Renaissance musical art are to be found, not in the Burgundian chansons, but in

the late masses and motets of Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem, with their sense

of tonal clarity, growing equality among the voices, and increasingly large-scale structures.

Binchois's use of the triad and control of dissonance are admittedly forward looking,

but his structurally conservative songs remain very much a part of the riches of the

Middle Ages, small jewels of lyrical expression set within the rigid poetic forms of the

rondeau and ballade.

The tendency to claim more for the Burgundian song than is its due-cultural fulcrum

of the French-Hapsburg conflicts, progenitor of Renaissance musical style-should be

excused as the admirable excess of an author passionately committed to his subject. In

the end the value of this unique and unusual volume rests not in its overreaching con-

clusions but in the meticulous analyses of musical style and literary tradition that precede

them.

CRAIG WRIGHT, Yale University

LISA J. KISER, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry. Hanover, N.H., and London:

University Press of New England, 1991. Pp. xi, 201. $35.

This study commands respect for its solid scholarly virtues: blessed by a strong, clear

thesis, kept squarely before the reader at all times, it is written with care and precision,

taking full account of previous criticism, scrupulous and gracious in its acknowledgments.

Kiser's thesis expands on the notion that "Chaucer's narrative poetry consistently

exposes the limitations of human knowledge and calls into question the accessibility of

'truth' "-not in itself a "novel idea," as she admits (p. 1). When, however, Chaucer's

texts are viewed as pretending to historical record, as attempts to convey a truth about

something that "really happened," they reveal countless maneuvers that subvert that

possibility. If, as the medieval commonplace has it, the world is a book (p. 149), all texts

that attempt to engage it are necessarily glosses, subject to the whims and prejudices of

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