Repetition as Rebirth: A Sung Epitaph for Gautier De Coinci

The thirteenth-century prior and poet-musician Gautier de Coinci is known for his extravagant wordplay, which relies on the recursive patterning of verbal sound. This article considers Gautier’s penchant for sonic repetition in the light of the music that frames his book of miracles, focusing on the song Por mon chief reconforter, a chanson à refrain written in the voice of an aging Gautier coming to terms with his imminent death. The song’s exclusion from Frederic Koenig’s standard edition of the Miracles means it has received little scholarly attention, yet its earliest source is linked with Gautier’s original exemplar. The article examines how repeated musico-poetic forms—within the stanza, between stanzas, and in the more temporally extended repetition of contrafacture—interact with notions of temporality and mortality voiced in the song’s texts and contexts, suggesting that such structures reshape the experience of time into one that is less linear, and therefore less final.

La vierge dans les arts et les littératures du Moyen Age. Actes du colloque de Perpignan du 17 au 19 octobre 2013, ed. Paul Bretel, Michel Adroher, and Aymat Catafau. Paris: Honoré Champion 2017, pp. 410.

The role of Mary in the Middle Ages has often been discussed in the context of theological or even social interpretations. A new collection of essays edited by Paul Bretel, Michel Adroher, and Aymat Catafau draws from that same tradition. But while most studies have specialized in certain aspects of the Marian tradition, this book proposes an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses both literary <?page nr="311"?>and artistic analysis. Relying heavily on works like Kathy M. Krauses’s Gautier de Coinci: miracles, Music and Manustripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), La vierge dans les arts et les littératures du Moyen Age offers a multifaceted approach that proposes in turn new perspectives of studies on the role of Mary in the literature and art of the Middle Ages. Perhaps significantly, the authors have decided to include all the illustrations of the book in the middle section, offering at the same time a new examination of the works in a novel, unprecedented way. The different indexes (persons, authors, works, themes) speak also to the interdependence of all the articles and the value of this collection.

MOTIFS OF THE “MIRACLES OF OUR LADY” IN PUSHKIN’S POEM “THE LEGEND”

This study is devoted to the identification of sources of Pushkin’s original poem “There Lived a Poor Knight ...” (“The Legend”). Through revealing the “traces” of a literary source in the drafts of “The Legend,” the details of the narrative “Will Taken for Deed,” going back to a Middle French transcription of the poetic collection “The Miracles of Our Lady” by Gautier de Coinci, have been found. Perhaps, while working on “The Legend,” the poet used a motif of the Virgin Mary’s mystical names in the collection of Marian miracles by Caesar of Heisterbach. Both “The Legend” and Franz’s song in “Scenes from Knightly Times” consistently moved away from the Marian narrative. This substantiates the interpretation of both versions as an evolution in the same direction originally chosen by the poet.