I mean, it was. The. On. Cardinal. This Abu. May the 13th century was a time of great change in Europe, the cities of Florence, Paris and Eros became thriving commercial centres on the back of the disastrous reign of King John of England. The French crown had also grown significantly in strength into this world. We find the true that's poets and musicians who wrote and sang about the pains of love and politics and of devotion to the Virgin Mary.
Their songs preserved in 20 song compendia called Sansoni, but also found scattered throughout many early mediaeval manuscripts, are a rare window into mediaeval vernacular culture. With me to discuss these rivers are Megan Quinlan, a default student in musicology at Merton College, and Julie Mason, a default student author in musicology at Lincoln College. Thank you very much for joining me. Perhaps you could start us off by just so small task.
I know, describing a few of the things that were going on in Europe at the time that these songs are being written. What's the historical context? Sure. Well, we take the two fairs from the second half of the 12th century until about the end of the 13th century. And some of the events going on at this time, of course, we've got the fierce rivalry between the English crown, the Plantagenet dynasty and the French crown, the capuchin dynasty.
And as you mentioned in your introduction, in the 20s and 30s, there was a great loss of territory by the English. And as a result of this, the French crown came to power. I think the general view, humane and a huge quantity of large quantity of France is really getting in strife. Absolutely. And another another gain of territory for France around this time is the longer dog. Where is that exactly?
Is that the map of France in my head, which in modern day France that in the 12th century was separated into roughly and half into the area of France, which spoke northern French and their word for yes, was real. So it was referred to as the long tail and the south of France, whose word for yes was OK. So that territory was referred to as the longer dog I see.
And in the first few decades of the 13th century, the French crown crusaded to the south of France, the longer dog in order to gain territory, supposedly on the grounds of counteracting heresy. And the truth is come out of earlier tradition of troubadours, which was maybe early, was actually reading your notes. Can you describe a bit about how the two rivers differ from the troubadours?
So there's more variation, I think, of class in the true tradition in both traditions, the Troubadours and Travaris Act serving a patron. So they find their livelihood through a patron for whom they sort of had to compete. So there is a sense of competition and I think a fair bit of so they were probably itinerant in the sense that when their patrons moved caught, they would follow with them.
But in the true tradition, you also get musical activity amongst the bourgeoisie, especially later on in the 13th century. So in our tours in Iraq. So you guess, for instance, people of someone who is going on these crusades that are just so Thibeault is one of the highest ranking Trivers.
He was the count of champagne, a very powerful figure, provided political leverage for Blanche to steal the mother of St. Louis, Louis, the night Blanche was the region to France between the death of her husband, Louis the eighth and Louis the ninth ascension to that or his his his maturity. So he because Louis the Ninth was crowned at the age of 12, I think so. There were a few years in between rebels that had to take power.
And Thibeault was was her greatest supporter during this time because there were rebellions happening as well amongst the French parentage. When a regent takes power, there tends to be more political instability. So Thibeault was a very powerful figure. He also later on became king of Navarre in the south of France, was not very well liked by the residents because he he tended to use their resources to bolster up his country of champagne,
which was much further to the north. Yes, much further north and in. So the chanson is normally place him towards the beginning because often they're categorised according to rank. So you'll start with songs by Thiebaud the Champagne. Yet because he's the most sort of aristocratic traveller and then they follow down the line because we have this really quite large spectrum of tasks.
You say there are these sort of mercantile class of musicians, poets who are seeking patrons and are putting their livelihood through their patrons. But you also have I think so we have evidence of this more and at the end of the 13th century and I think there's also an aspect of aspiring to the aristocracy. We have a really interesting manuscript here at Oxford called Destry Await.
Our Supervisors is researching it at the moment, but it contains narratives about jousts and feasts and all of these sort of very aristocratic activities. But it is probably made by the bourgeoisie and owned first by a bourgeois owner. And there's also amongst the bourgeoisie, what's known as PRIX'S, or competitions, songwriting competitions, particularly interests. You have the US and I'm sure JOKIN can say a little bit more because arouses a great centre of the song tradition,
lots of what we find comes out of us. So Arus has been treated by some scholars as kind of the cradle of modern literature. In a way, there's this extraordinary literary culture in the US in the 13th century, partly because I think the statistic is 25 percent of the men in the US were literate because of clerical training and then clerical training, which these men did not take up in their subsequent jobs. So there were too many trained clerics in the clerical ranks of the jobs.
And one possible outlet for if you were a trained cleric but you couldn't get a job, you know, you couldn't get into a monastery or into the church was to become a chantler, who is a performer of SHAMSUL, a performer of of other things as well, such as recounting stories, telling jokes, falling over, farting on demand activities. Let's get a sense of the subject matter of these songs, because they're very varied.
But there are certain tropes that the writers of the text can always go back to you. Perhaps you could start us off or we can we can go back and forth. So does the Courtney Love. The pains of love is a big yes. So that's kind of the principal genre of these songs. They typically open with the screen topos. When I hear the birth of me singing, I am moved to sing because love tells me to sing. That's the kind of classic opening. The other important aspects of this trope are.
It's love for a higher lady. She is unattainable. There are certain aspects of kind of fusel imagery in this relationship to the lady. So there's often the image of the poet singer on his knees, hands clasped, head bowed before his lady in a in an attitude of homage to her. There are frequent images such as the dot of love, the prism of love, separation of separation of the heart from the love his body. So so the heart is sort of taken out of the lover's chest and resides with the lady.
But the cervera poet, singer, lover character doesn't really mind because he's sort of loyally devoted to the lady. And it's so it's this kind of paradox between suffering and the sweetness of love. It's like sort of getting caught up into this this circle, this this vicious circle of of love, which was seen as a sickness then. So if you think of the Saijo mentioned the the dart of love topos, we see this on Valentine's Day.
Still right. Cupid is, of course, shooting his arrow into somebody's heart. But this had sort of more physiological associations in the 13th century. Some earlier theories of vision posit that when you see rather than light going into your eyes, your eyes themselves shoot out darts of light, which then make impressions on the objects around you and and take that information back into your mind.
And so these these are shown often in manuscript size being arrows and the figure of love shoots arrows into the eyes. And then these arrows go into sort of pass through the bodily humours into the heart. And the arrows are fiery arrows, arrows of light like you would get in vision. And because they're fiery, when they go into the heart, they sort of set it aflame. So there's this whole aspect of physiology and temperature and heat.
And that's why the lover size, because they're fanning the fuels of this fire. It's like they want more of it. But the more they get, the more they suffer. So to bring in here is that most of these songs were written by and performed by and performed for them. Exactly. So one of the other contradictions that's got the heart of the calling of topos is that you're singing about love, but your lady would never hear it. So there's always this unrequited aspect.
Of course, this unrequited aspect means that the tradition can be perpetuated because the song you can never thinking about unrequited feelings. Yes, it's always the desire that allows you to sing. And if that desire were fulfilled, you wouldn't necessarily need to sing in your job. You. Yeah, and the lady also is is she's always kind of the same lady. She has a clear face clad voice. She's very beautiful.
She's the most beautiful lady. So it's not we don't really get a sense that they're singing to specific ladies, but to a kind of idealised, abstract lady who might be interpreted in many different ways. And and indeed, there's quite interesting issues around gender here because. Certainly for troubador poetry. You find that? That lady has many female characteristics like her clear face, sometimes mentions aspects of her body as well.
And yet there's also the male side to her personality, which is this kind of dominating figure who you have to pay homage to. So there's a uneasy relationship between the gender. Yeah, you could you could almost say she's kind of like a third gender in a sense, because women at the time didn't have any political power besides figures like belongs to Castiel. This was quite rare.
And so to treat a lady as your kind of feudal overlord bow down to a lady and be dominated by her because there really is this dynamic of domination. The ladies is beautiful, but she's also cruel because she doesn't acknowledge you and you just sort of waiting for this. Just a slight sense of acknowledgement from her, but it never comes. So that's the major trope, I guess. But there are certain pastorale you write about, which is a shepherdess and a knight.
So the pastoral is a fairly formulaic genre. It centres around one encounter, as you say, between a knight and a shepherdess. It normally starts with the line. The other day I rode out into the countryside. So we've immediately got this image of a knight riding out into the countryside where he encounters a shepherdess. He amorously advances on the shepherdess and presses her for kisses and more. Then there are a range. There is a range of responses. Sometimes the shepherdess acquiesces.
Sometimes she refuses that there may be rape in these texts. And there is also the figure of Robin who comes. He may come to rescue his shepherdess when she calls him. He may come to rescue her and it's too late. She may call for him and he may not answer, or she may be willingly in the arms of the night when Robin walks in and finds them variations on the theme. Exactly. But also your speciality, these songs called Unusual Party, which are I mean, you tell us, though, that debate songs.
That's right. So the party literally means divided game or game of choice, but we get the word jeopardy from it. And in these songs, the first verse, a question is presented by one of the singers. And it's always a question of courtly love. So is it better to. Well, I think that we're about to hear you sing one of these songs. Megan, you told me earlier what the central question of this.
Yes. Is. The question of this particular example is, is it better to sleep with one lady for all night but not accomplish all of your desire? Or is it better to sleep with a lady and sleep directly afterward, so you leave the you take the flower, leave the fruit. But this song is written as a dialogue debate between a man and a woman taking opposing sides. Now as normal first party, we alternate the two singers alternate stanzas, each taking a side of the debate.
Now, there are a few unusual things about this, this Sparty, one of which is that it's between a man and a woman, mostly party between two men. Hmm. The second unusual thing is that the man jumps in midway through one of the verses and doesn't allow the woman to finish. You really do get the sense that the debate is getting more heated and you can imagine well, you can probably guess which voice takes which side to sort of gender stereotypes.
And in this case, there is also sort of a sense that this dynamic is happening not just on the level of the content of the argument, but also in the relationship between the singers, because it's between a man and a woman. And the woman is asking my friend, and this is not just friend, it's also it can be lover. It's a very, very intimate term. And in some of the manuscript versions of this, the lady always calls the male voice Amies, my my beloved, my friend.
But the male voice calls the lady dolma, which is a much more formal term rather than Omiya. So you kind of get the sense that the the female voice is asking, you know, is it better to the whole argument is really is it is affection, better affection and time spent together better than just, you know, doing it and going one night stand.
And since the male voice goes for the one night stand and the voice takes the other option, there is this effect produced of the lady wanting the man to stay or having a bit more affection for the man than the man does for the woman. That's an incredible description, but that's where we're going to be cutting in about halfway through, I believe, notes. We have a pitchfork here a last minute. In the. Said on. Cardinal. This Abu. Miss. So keep.
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Congruently. Don. Third party see Don Sherwood, energy policy may call her tone today motorcycle's of he key part of the wild cards her to her. Tom, Poggio, including Lesia, illegally here we have it on my arm, me Curly Ferré has. Call for a mere Sleaford, I say, Tam, what a good hater, Paul, and he can have Morrisson Hey hardcoded heads. Or feed her and I cannot let her see. Thank you very much. That was absolutely wonderful.
Can we talk a bit about these Sonia themselves, these documents that we have, these songs and others from what what do they look like? Are they vellum, parchment and parchment and so very expensive material? It takes a number of sheep or cows to make a book. And the objects themselves are very luxurious. And you can you can tell this, especially looking at the margins.
You've got these huge, huge unused spaces of margins which sort of emphasises its decadence, lots of gold leaf historian and initials. So those big, big initials that you you can imagine in mediaeval manuscripts and and they have pictures of various Travaris at the beginning of each, uh, each section. You've got pictures of knights and singers and so on. And what is the musical notation itself look like? Because I guess it will be very different to what we might see if we open a book today.
Sure. So some things are similar. We still have a Stav. It's drawn in in red and there are at least four lines, mostly four lines, sometimes more. We also, as in modern notation, have a clef at the start of each line. Normally a C clef, but this can also be an F clef.
And then the notes themselves are 12th and 13th century French square notation, which bears some resemblance to the kind of news that one might see in chant books that are used in the Catholic Church today, for example, that say you can have just notes on there on their own, but they can be combined together. You told me earlier. That's right. So in in modern notation, we link together notes using all sorts of of means.
Sometimes we use it to show rhythm. Sometimes we link notes together with slurs or ties to show that you join notes together. Principally in this music, you join notes together to show that they belong to one syllable. Yeah, and I think it's also important to note that the notation of this music is from a very different tradition than the music itself. So the notation that that they're using is the notation of church music, of chant and of motets or.
Yeah, mostly of chant. So you're kind of. You're kind of trying to capture a tradition using a different language and a different musical language, and so there are certain things that we can't really recover all the time. For example, rhythm, we don't know. This is like this used to be a massive debate which nearly sort of stifled all study in this area because college was so angry at each other.
Was was there rhythm in this music? And a few German scholars sort of made very elaborate theories of rhythm in this music. But others sort of very, very strongly rejected this. And we still don't know. But I think nobody really cares very much anymore. We kind of just we accept the doubt and and move on and try to we try to find out other aspects of this music. So who was writing down these songs in the chants on the air?
Were they sort of roughly contemporary when the songs were being written and sung? Well, these books written all at once, or they composed piece by piece. Well, it's kind of a complicated story. The earliest chanson that we have is from the 40s or 50s, from eastern France, quite a quite a way away from the centre, the geographical centre of this tradition.
Now, the earliest truth as drawn out in our country and of course, actually the Icelandic Lucy were writing at the end of the 12th century and the start of the 13th century. So that's a time gap of 30 years. We then have something here being produced pretty much in every decade up until the first decade of the 14th century. So from 12, 50 onwards, we have. Sean, eight from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 12 90s and from the 30s, hundreds.
And these are mostly being produced in Artois, which is a region in northeastern France, nearly of just south of Lille is Århus, which is the centre of Artois. And we imagine they would have been produced in ateliers. So not not within the church, but they're kind of scriber workshops, grabble workshops here. But there isn't very much evidence of these the workshops themselves.
So we rely quite heavily actually on art, historical evidence of the Illuminations and the historian and initials in the manuscripts and who's paying for them. Hmm. Patrons. So one particular example is the short, funny idea, what it's known as the ceremony of the King, probably copied in the 12 60s or 70s in the Artois, possibly. It's been suggested for Charles of Austria, who was the younger brother of Louis the 9th, and he became king of Naples and at one point king of Jerusalem.
And these were, as I said before, these were very expensive objects and they were used probably as status symbols by these wealthy patrons. We don't really think they were sung from very often because they're they don't bear much sign that many signs of wear. So we might look, for example, in manuscripts for Tear's in pages or worn edges, particularly on the sides or dirt. And that gives us a sign of how much the book might have been used. Mm hmm.
But these lots of visuals are really quite clean and in good condition. Very good condition, which suggests that actually. The singers just knew the music that these these notes functioned more like memory cues and maybe they were passed around, you know, when you had guests to to spark discussion, to to spark the performance of music. But they were not necessarily sung from their words like codebooks. So no. Very different kind of.
I think it's time to talk about control factor, which I word that I learnt this morning, where you get one song to the tune of another. It's like, I'm sorry, I haven't a clue. This happens quite a lot. You tell me the melodies travel very far and wide in Europe. Yes, I have one example of a melody. It began its life as a troubadour. Melody can allows that to move there. And it's quite a well known melody in its time.
It was we know that it was well known because it was disseminated in over 30, 40 manuscripts from all over France, in England as well. At least the melody was disseminated there. But so the Troubadour song itself has at least four different contra factor. One of the contra facts is the one the Jeopardy that we just sang, and that's that's preserved in a source from Burgundy and one from Lorrain.
So sort of northeastern France. But there's also a Latin debate fact, which is about something similar that these these two male and female voices. So they were arguing about about love and they're using imagery that has to do with the eye and the heart. So they're talking about the art of love topos, again, about being struck by this fiery dart which travels into your heart and bursts and makes it burst into flames.
Well, the Latin contra fact is actually a debate between a heart, a personified heart and a personified eye over the dangers of love. And so it sort of turned this rhetoric of about love into a rhetoric about lust and sin, the sins of the eye, which are written on the heart. But there's another kind of fact which is in the voice of a female to there. And then there are more. Oh, yes, it's then it sort of moves full circle.
And in the early 14th century or the late 13th century, we have a we see the melody turning up in a mystery play on St. Agnes, who also had sort of had a lot to do with the dangers of love because she was betrothed to a Roman soldier. But of course, she wanted to she wanted to be the bride of Christ. Right. So but they stripped stripped her naked and sent her to a brothel.
And so this is sung at that part of the play. There's actually a citation in this place manuscript, and instead of citing the original troubador song, which from that which was from the south of France, they cite the Latin song, which was from probably around Paris. This play, the manuscript of this plays from the south of France. So it's odd that they would cite a song from so far away.
But we get the sense that over time, maybe the maybe the Troubadour song is forgotten or maybe this Latin song is more sort of appropriate about this Latin song, about the sin of lust for this particular play. So there's a huge sort of inter textual dialogue happening. And this is typical of a lot of control factor. Sometimes you get the first line repeated, in fact, the first line of the original song.
So it's setting up an expectation that you're going to hear a particular song. But then the line, the text changes. It diverges from the original. So you get the sense that the writers of these contra factor want the audience to think or they're sort of tricking the audience into thinking they're hearing this original song. Everybody knows that's really widely disseminated. But no, actually, they're hearing something else.
I realise that there's one thing that we haven't managed to talk about yet, which is the cult of the Virgin Mary, that these Courtney Love poems, they lend themselves well to small alteration, to a very, very Christian message where the woman is now the Virgin Mary. Yeah, because you've got this idealised lady anyway. And so the most idealised lady of all would be Mary. So it's quite, quite easy to to transform these into Mary in songs, quite Orthodox Mary in songs.
And a number of Travaris themselves made their own Mary in songs, possibly for their own devotion. But there are other figures like Gotanda Quincy, who was a Benedictine prior, and he made it his mission really to take as many true their songs as he could and transform them into Mary songs in various in very clever ways. Because you get this with contracture, you get this sort of layering of meaning happening.
And so often these texts are reacting against the Tuvaluans, whereas the lady in the original text is is cruel and so on. And Mercilus, of course, Mary is the intercessor. She is the most merciful lady of all, and God has a huge dissemination of his manuscripts. He's one of the first authors to have ordered and compiled his manuscripts very meticulously.
He wants it to be ordered in a very specific way. And there are over 100 manuscripts with his his stories and his songs in them about the Virgin Mary. So there was a link between the religious and the secular song styles at the time through these these resetting of the tunes for religious purposes.
Absolutely. And I think actually conjure facta sort of blur the lines between sacred and secular all the time, because some of these, Travaris, even so generous and so on, were associated with Confraternity or were amongst themselves and and were writing so-called secular love songs about the Dharma the Lady. And we know that figures like Ordinated Quassey or there's another one named Adamsville Abbassi,
they were very aware of these songs and they knew them. They knew them well enough to be able to construct other songs from them. And one of the interesting things about these kind of eternities is that they were on the whole in general, they were dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
So the one that we know the most about the puy of our US was founded on this 11th century miracle where the Virgin Mary appeared to two joggler who were estranged, brought them together with the bishop of Arus, gave them a miraculous candle. And from this legend, this confraternity of Shangla of postings was formed. So there are these analogues between the sacred and the secular all the time. Hmm. We'll come back to talk more about contraception later.
But the texts of many of these songs are, by modern standards, rather rather rude, rather bawdy. Can you give us some sense of why people wrote and wrote in this way? Well, I think it's first important to stress that tastes in bawdiness change. So we in the 21st century still have something of a hangover from the Victorian sensibility.
It's been relatively widely discussed about why why literary texts from this time are quite so rude, and one argument for it is that there's quite strict codification about what you are allowed to say and what you should say. And the flipside of that is that people sometimes want to let out what they're not allowed to say. And these songs are the media when they can do it as well. So suggesting, for example, you might see in a mediaeval book.
I'm thinking of a 14th century copy of the Rome until a Rose, very famous 13th century text, which during a diatribe against women in the margin, the illuminator has drawn a picture of a nun in the arms of a monk and in another page, a nun picking phalluses off a tree, for example. This one has made the rounds on the Internet. It's a very, very famous example.
And. The art historian Michael Karmiel has made the argument that this kind of margin and made body text relationship is sort of symbolic of the way mediaeval people might have thought. So in the main body of the text, you have the orthodox framework of how one should think. And in the margins you have a kind of subversive, bawdy, rude aspect to mediaeval thought. And we see this in certain opposition.
So we have the normal church liturgy, the prescribed services of the church, and then we have occasional feasts such as the Feast of Fools, which happened after Christmas where a boy bishop was elected and a boy was bishop for the day. This is kind of mediaeval liturgy turned upside down, topsy turvy atomically turf if you so that people got it out of their system and the status quo could remain.
So you're suggesting that these vernacular songs, although we might perhaps at first past see them as from subversive, actually, they have a role in preserving the Orthodox. Yes. So one theory about troubador poetry, because it doesn't it sort of doesn't make sense why all of these knights might have been singing about desire for a lady who they couldn't have.
You know, why? Why waste their time on it? Well, scholars have argued that actually this desire and this singing keeps the knights busy so that they can't it sort of keeps them in a position of subjugation so that they then can't challenge the overlords of the court. And in a way, these this kind of bawdiness does the same thing rather than it being a sign that everyone is being immoral and. Promiscuous, it could, in fact, be people able to talk about it so they don't go and do it.
Although you mentioned the songs about love, keeping the lights busy and not thinking of political gain, there is an example of a contracture that make a legend in her notes in which a rather sharp political point is made by guards against the king. Yeah, and I've actually found a few examples of these these contri factor, this political culture factor. In this particular instance, we have a contract which is based on a true Verizon and it shares similar phrases.
So in the trivia song you have phrases like, I've been sweetly deceived, but in the political song it says, I've been cruelly deceived. And what happens in the political song is instead of being addressed to a lady or talking about a lady, the narrator here talks about Lady France in the original song.
You have all of these kind of that the typical ambiguity of a true very narrators voice, which is saying at the same time that the lady is beautiful and sweet, but also that the lady is cruel and really underneath. It's kind of masking the kind of hatred or kind of anger. But this is externalised in the political song and it's directed toward France and toward Louis the ninth in particular,
Saint Louis, who is king at the time. Based on some of the references of what's happening, so they say that we've been we've been judged by inquest, all of the barons are are astonished because they've lost their rights. What this is based on is a historical event towards the end of the century, around the 12th, 60s, 70s, where a baron named Underland QC found some young people apparently trespassing on his lands.
Now, this is preserved in, I think, six different chronicles. So there are different versions of it. But basically, he he arrested these three young people, youths, it says, I think, and had them hanged just for trespassing on his in his forests. And a relative of the young people complained to Saint Louis, who at this time had a great reputation for being the king of justice.
You know, the just killing the good king. And Louis had uncle brought to a hearing and uncle wanted to settle it by judicial duel, which was was quite common at the time, was kind of a tradition, traditional way of settling justice. So so the idea was whoever had the truth in them would would win the duel because sort of God was on their side. But in this case, because the youths were not of any aristocratic status, there was nobody who could really defend them in that way.
And so Lewis said, no, this is not fair. I'm going to be subjected to trial by inquest. And according to to French mediaeval French law, this wasn't really constitutional in this case because it would touch his his personal, his status. So although he actually sort of circumvented traditional customary law in this case and forced ungiven to to submit to this trial.
And uncle ended up paying a huge fine, had to spend three years in the Holy Land, had to have a church built where prayers would be said for the three young people in perpetuity. I don't know, maybe they're still being said. But but the thing was that Libby was breaking with convention here.
And and this song is written by the barons in defence of well, we don't know exactly who wrote it, but probably a baronial voice, probably somebody who is sympathetic because the other barons were with anger at this trial and they were equally sort of amazed and confused. But the thing is, the song doesn't directly criticise Louis because that would be dangerous. We know that they didn't have any sort of violent uprising, at least there's no there's no evidence of that.
So it seems like the only way they could get back or protest was through music. But the song mentions the mendicants. So the song doesn't blame Louis. It's very careful to blame the mendicants instead of the Dominican and Franciscan friars who were very close to Louis, who were advisers to him, but also they they name one amongst themselves, one of the nobility who is to blame. And that, I think is Seimone the Klerk more or Seimone than now.
Now, Simon Simon of now was from Noel, and he was one of Louie's most trusted advisers. He took control of France when Louis went on the Sixth Crusade. And it so happens that this song is taken from. The original to their song is by somebody named Blondell Donau, who is probably from this same area.
So what I think is that by using Blondell song, you're kind of getting you're targeting music musically, SIMONOV now, because and actually I found that there might there might be a relation between the two. They had a familial. Yes, that's right. It depends on who you think Blondell is because there is some question over his identity, his historical identity. But if he is two of the figures that scholars think he is, then he would be related to Simonov now.
So they're using this song by Blondell to kind of, I don't know, target or at least provoke dialogue or a kind of rich commentary on what's happening here. We have about five minutes left. Joe Madison, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the reception of his songs, their history. Do they influence later songwriters and poets? Another big question. I'm sorry. I mean, one thing to say is that mediaevalism has really captured the modern imagination, particularly in the 19th century.
You know, we're in Oxford and we're surrounded by Victorian buildings, inspired by the mediaeval Gothic. And in a way, the reception of courtly song is a kind of romantic nostalgia for that. One of the important effects of the songs of the trevisan in the troubadours is the trope of the love song. This was really established by the troubadours, possibly with Arabic influence before that. And it's now the dominant genre of popular music and love songs.
You can trace love songs right from the troubadours through the arson and over in the in the 14th century to show some in the 15th century courtly court songs, songs, madrigal's in the 16th century. Then we get into lovesongs opera, 19th century leader, 20th century pop songs. To finish, I think we've heard a little bit about your work, about Simon Denel, but Joe, what are you working on at the moment?
Well, at the moment, I'm also working on contracture, in fact, specifically related to debates almost as your party, because it seems that early debates, songs might have taken their melodies from lovesongs, the particular songs I'm working on at the moment. One is the debates on which debates whether it is better to be able to see and talk to your lover, but without kissing or touching her or to kiss or touch her, but without being able to see or speak to her.
Now the song that shares a melody with this is a song devoted to the Virgin Mary. And in this song, The Champagne, the king of Trivers compares his love for women to his love for the Virgin Mary. And this is allegories in an elaborate image of trees and fruit. So he says that his heart is an orchard which is full of withered, unripe fruit trees that will never bear fruit properly because it's not what God wants for him.
Whereas Mary is the is the sweetest tree who will give sweet fruit that will satisfy him forever through her son Christ. And there are all sorts of interesting readings. If you read the songs together, you can see that on the one hand, this devotional song is trying to transform profane love into something more idealised.
On the other hand, if you look at the debate about whether you should sleep with or without speaking to or speak to, without sleeping with, there's a kind of anxiety about male sexual prowess and impotence, which ties in to all of this imagery about trees, trees that when flower and trees, that only flower. When you say I've got. Well, thank you very much, both of you. I feel we've barely scratched the surface in our 45 minutes. Yes, just so much to take in and to learn.
Next week, we'll be talking about Oscar Wilde.