Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:03am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Medieval Models of Musical Transmission Session Chair: Barbara Haggh-Huglo | |
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The Parliament of Birds: Poetry and the Transmission of Song in Late Medieval England University of Oxford The Parliament of Birds is an anonymous, 120-line macaronic poem in French and Middle English, which survives uniquely in the early fifteenth-century English manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.4.27. The poem portrays an avian debate, in which sixteen species of bird weigh the delights and disappointments of love. While the majority of this debate is in Middle English, the final lines in thirteen of the poem’s fifteen stanzas are in French. These French lines are linked to a musical context by the turtledove, who opens the dispute by ‘syngen…In frensch ho so the rondele knewe’ (‘singing…In French, as she knew the roundel’, lines 14–15). Scholarship (Conlee 1991; Butterfield 2009; Doyle 2021) has found concordances for the song thrush’s line ‘Qui bien ayme tard oublye’ (line 32) in the well-circulated refrain Qui bien aime, Guillaume de Machaut’s Lay de plour (c.1349–1350), and a ballade by Eustache Deschamps. The twelve remaining French lines have not been discussed. Do these lines have similar concordances in French-language poetic works with musical settings? What might such concordances reveal about the performance and dissemination of music in late-medieval England? This paper proposes concordances for three more of the Parliament’s French-texted lines, and suggests that the nine remaining lines have more general resonances with a broader corpus of courtly song. The network of musical texts collected in the Parliament enables the remembrance and facilitates the performance of these works, transmitting this music both to a fifteenth-century audience, and to readers in the present day. | |