The art of interpolation in the Roman de Fauvel
The music of Paris, BN fonds fr. 146 has long held a special place in medieval musicology as one of the most abundant records of musical taste and style in the early decades of the 14th century, particularly
 so in its famous version of the Old French satire of the Roman de Fauvel , interpolated with no less than 169 musical items. In the last decade, however, perspective on the manuscript has radically
 altered in a new climate of interdisciplinary research. If there was once a tendency for scholars to extrapolate information from the manuscript, to allow its abundant visual, musical, literary and political
 texts to speak of cultures exterior to the book9s bindings, recent collaborative approaches have focused attention on how those different media work together within the boundaries of the parchment. One
 consequence of such an approach is to raise new questions about music9s role in the book, most particularly about its relationship to the narrative into which it is cast. This study explores perhaps the
 most startling and perplexing aspect of music9s position in Fauvel: the numerous occasions where music is uncued and unprepared in the narrative. I focus on the most famous moment of narrative disjunction
 brought about by the presence of song: the interpolated bifolio, 28 bis and ter, containing the lai Pour recouvrer alegiance . Long viewed by musicologists as an ill-conceived afterthought, it is
 suggested that the song9s intrusion (narrative and bibliographic) may be interpreted poetically, as a moment of lyric suspension engineered by its singer, Fauvel, in der to defer his lady9s final, deadly
 refusal of his marriage suit. That deferral occurs not just in an abstract moment of lyrical time, but in the real, unfurling space of the parchment: As time passes (the reader turning the folios), Fortuna9s
 impatience finally becomes palpable as she dramatically enters the landscape of the song in its closing moments. Song may thus be understood to occupy not only time but also space; the manuscript, it is
 argued, is witness to a new form of music-making in France at the turn of the 14th century, music-making that is material as well as sonic.
The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry
TWO PASSAGES in the Roman de Fauvelt contain the information that the author's name was Gervais du Bus, who is known to have been a notary at the royal chancellery at least as early as 1313,2 and that he completed its two books in 130o and 1314. One of the roman's twelve extant sources, the famous manuscript Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fond franfais 146, presents a version considerably enlarged by copious illuminations as well as by textual and musical insertions. A remark on fol. 23v attributes these additions to Chaillou de Pesstain, a member of the French royal court and holder of various functions of provincial government, who seems to have completed his revision about the end of 1316.a Several of the motets added by him have been recognized on the basis of circumstantial evidence to be by Phillippe de Vitry.4 In a dissertation on the Roman de Fauvel published in 1935, Emilie Dahnk briefly mentioned the significant discovery that one of the monophonic compositions included by Chaillou in his edition of the roman and listed as a "prose" in the original index of music, is actually the somewhat altered triplum of a Latin motet, whose tenor is melodically identical with that of a motet preserved in the same manuscript.5 The "prose," Carnalitas, luxuria, appears on fol. 12. The motet with whose triplum it concords is the first piece (Floret cum vana gloria / Florens vigor ulciscendo / [Tenor]) on the verso of the rotulus preserved at the Bibiotheque Royale in Brussels as MS 19606. And the motet with which the latter shares its tenor is Garrit gallus / In nova fert, presumably one of Vitry's earliest compositions. (The latter motet appears in two sources
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":