Conference Agenda

In the manuscript tradition of thirteenth-century French motets, a handful mix Occitan vocabulary into their lyrics and have thus been labeled “hybrid” Franco-Occitan motets; for individual words, “hybrid” forms dismissed as artistic corruptions reveal themselves instead as markers of specific regional dialects. Most scholars have concluded that these “hybrid” motets’ linguistic mixing stemmed from French composers deliberately borrowing Occitan words to evoke the troubadours’ prestige (c.f., Zingesser 2020, Aubrey 1997). However at the level of vocabulary, the concept of “hybridity,” stands in for words that fail to align with standard dictionary forms, oversimplifying the rich dialectal variation that characterized medieval Romance languages. Words that appear to mix elements of both standardized French or Occitan need not be interpreted as corruptions, for medieval dialects of both language families were always already influenced by each other and constantly redefined by admixture through a process called koineization (c.f., Lodge 2004).

In this paper I demonstrate how attention to regional dialects can reveal composers’ and scribes’ linguistic backgrounds, offering new explanations for supposedly anomalous word forms in the motet tradition. Navigating composers’ dialects, scribes’ spelling norms, and linguistic mixing afforded by manuscripts, I show how the so-called “hybridized” words in the Ars antiqua motet Tuit cil qui sunt enamourat/ Li jalous sunt fustat/ Veritatem align closely with the Gascon dialect rather than some invented “hybrid” between French and Occitan. This example—continuing to defy clear categorization since István Frank’s 1954 philological analysis—spotlights Occitan’s dialectal diversity and the shortcomings of treating the langue d’oc family as a monolith.

While previous scholarship has struggled to distinguish scribal interventions from composers’ original choices, dialectal analysis provides new criteria for differentiating these transmission layers. For Tuit cil, Gascon vocabulary illuminates the composer’s linguistic background, while transformations into French morphology betray the scribe’s hand. This approach—particularly apt for treating “hybrid” motets in the Montpellier Codex and La Clayette manuscript—points to a model of motet creation outside the cultural sphere of Paris, with composers referencing familiar dialects rather than resorting to prestigious or hegemonic varieties and adaptation taking place at the hands of manuscript scribes.