Prions en Chantant: Devotional Songs of the Trouvères

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

Marcia Jenneth Epstein tells us that about 10 percent of the 2000 extant
songs by the poet–singers (trouvиres) of 13th-century France have
devotional texts. Thus, this collection of 61 devotional songs (49 with
music), which is drawn from two 13th-century manuscript collections at
the Bibliothиque nationale in Paris, represents a generous selection of
what has survived.

Epstein provides a lengthy introduction that delves into the provenance
and physical description of the collections, devotional songs as a
reflection of popular culture, and the content and nature of the lyrics.
She also dissects the varieties of melody, form, rhythm, and notation of
the music, and offers some guidelines for performance interpretation.
This is followed by the songs themselves, including the text of each
song in Old French with an English translation, and the music in both
original and modern notation. The poetry, which spans a wide emotional
range and is full of imagery, reveals a Marian devotion that was
characteristic of the era. The music is steeped in the modalities of
medieval popular song, and is eminently singable.

Based on a Ph.D. dissertation, Epstein’s book, while a sober,
scholarly treatise to read, is nonetheless a valuable contribution to
our understanding of this aspect of the trouvиre tradition.