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This chapter investigates cross-temporal relationships of voice between anonymous scribes and compilers and the named authors whose songs and identities they recorded. The chapter first considers the discrete libelli of songs by Thibaut de Champagne and Adam de la Halle preserved at either end of the chansonnier trouv. T (P-BNF fr. 12615). Through compilatio over time, scribes assembled the individual authorial voices of these two trouvères and created a genealogical line from the early-century Champagne noble to the late-century Artesian cleric. The second part of this chapter looks at the dismantling effects of continued compilatio by examining three late additions to the chansonnier trouv. M (P-BNF fr. 844), specifically three strophic chansons by the trouvères Robert de Castel, Perrin d’Angicourt, and Guiot de Dijon, whose music has been radically recomposed by later scribes “under the influence” of the descort, as well as refrain songs. The unusual forms, melodic behavior, and mensural notation betray an estrangement from the conventions of the repertory and can be read as conscious distortions or parodies—unauthorized versions engaged in an open-ended musical debate about the expressive confines of the aristocratic courtly chanson.

A study of various manuscripts permits us to track the movement of the idiom from lyric phenomenon to material archive. The chapter first illustrates descriptive historical poetics with two objects that embody typical monuments of the crusader and whose meanings seem clear in their respective disciplines of study—a crusader sword in the armored gisant of Jean d'Alluye, and the epitaph on the Frankish stele of Barthélemy Caïn. Understanding the Chinese sword and epitaph as two versions of speaking crusades, we can locate lyrical translations of crusades within and across texts and various possible situations through time and space. The chapter applies this method to manuscripts through modes of adjacency (Thibaut de Champagne, his inquest rolls and chansonnier), genre-existence (Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, his lyric and genres such as the Epic Letter, and their existence in chansonniers), and performative reconfigurations in the Latin East through contrafacture and adaptation of genres (Jehan de Journi's Disme de Penitanche, the lyric of the Templar of Tyre compared to Rutebeuf). The idiom becomes visible through descriptions strategically situated within historical discourses of language, culture, and materiality.

This chapter applies the concept of “the turn” in Louis Althusser’s theory of subject formation through interpellation by language to the musical turning points in medieval love lyrics that are tornadas, envois, and refrains. In most cases tornadas and envois are fragmentary half-stanzas that break the formal and thematic structure of the strophic canso and chanson with an abrupt change of voice and address, from the “timeless” idiomatic language of courtly love to a sudden rooting in the author’s present. Yet this moment of transparent subjectivity recycles rhymes, notes, and sometimes words in a way that resembles refrain procedures. Refrains in the context of dance songs are allegedly group responses, while in the context of chansons, motets, and narratives they often represent a quotation or reported song—a repetition of a different order. The familiar yet fresh musico-poetic turns of tornadas, envois, and refrains bring to the fore the paradox of agency and submission as well as ambiguities of subjectivity and expression inherent in medieval love songs; they formalize and thus authorize the disruption of the conventional voice, signaling the fissures between the self and the subject, as well as subjective and collective voices.

This chapter examines the figure of the separated heart in the crusade lyrics of the Châtelain d'Arras and Thibaut de Champagne. It reads these works that poetically articulate ambivalence about crusade against homiletic literature and sermons by Bernard of Clairvaux, Innocent III, Maurice of Sully, and others that emphasize the repentance, confession, and sincere love of a crusader with the "right intention." It demonstrates how the crusader-poet develops his own sincere voice and intention of crusade through devotion to the lady. This professional voice of erotic self-constraint, as opposed to the confessional voice, inspires him for crusade without obliging him to repent.