Chapter 2 - The changing song

Summary

Au bon vieulx temps ung train d'Amours regnoit.

Clément Marot, ‘De l'amour du siècle antique’

Quando si incomincio à far versi volgari e da quali.

Pietro Bembo, section heading in Le Prose

It would at first appear that, between 1400 and 1700, little if any interest was taken in the music of the troubadours and trouvères. Or, at least, this was the way nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers viewed it: medieval music had lain buried and forgotten until it was resurrected in the late eighteenth century. Troubadour and trouvère song never really disappeared however, and, beginning in the sixteenth century, scholars were already discussing the notation of the chansonniers. Several other developments crucial to later reception took place before 1700: the creation of a historical category called the ‘French antiquity’ (i.e., the Middle Ages), the continuation and expansion of troubadour and trouvère legends, a nationalistic debate between France and Italy which set the course for medieval studies, and the earliest stereotyping of medieval music as primitive and naïve. The songs of the troubadours and trouvères were far from forgotten. They were being remembered, and transformed as the remembering went on.

Of course, what we now call the Middle Ages only slowly came to be designated as such. Beginning in the sixteenth century, French writers frequently used the expression antiquité françoise or nostre antiquité; antiquité was by far the most common term to designate the Middle Ages.