UCLA

This dissertation explores the multifaceted role of memory in the formulation and transmission of love doctrine in Guillaume de Machaut’s corpus of poetry and music. Machaut’s poetic treatment of love was innovative in that unlike earlier conventions of love in medieval French poetry, it stressed the value of chastity, and a distinct love doctrine can be devised from his corpus that seeks to teach audiences to find amorous joy from within without dependence on or expectation of reciprocation. This doctrine, heretofore discussed at length by scholars such as Douglas Kelly and Elizabeth Eva Leach, is developed through a series of idealized virtues: Souvenir (Memory), Dous Penser (Sweet Thought), Esperance (Hope), and Souffisance (Sufficiency). While much existing scholarship has privileged Esperance, this study focuses on the crucial and largely overlooked role Souvenir and Dous Penser, which are correlated respectively to the Aristotelian notions of memoria et reminiscentia (memory and reminiscence). To demonstrate the nature and function of these virtues in Machaut’s corpus, four narrative poems are analyzed: the general prologue to BnF MS fr. 1584 (known simply as the Prologue), Remede de Fortune, La Fontaine Amoureuse, and Le Livre dou Voir Dit. These readings establish the necessary context within which to interpret the function of Souvenir and Dous Penser in Machaut’s more referentially abstract lyric poetry, much of which he set to music. Of equal importance is the study’s consideration of how the inherently mnemonic qualities of poetic structure and musical form work together to render text, melody, and the didactic messages they transmit more memorable. Analysis of lyric poetry focuses mostly on the lais, and consideration of music includes the songs inserted into Remede de Fortune, and the virelais, with a privileged focus on monophonic selections, since they bear certain mnemonic and didactic qualities less prevalent in polyphony. As this dissertation responds to recent calls for greater engagement among literary scholars with Machaut’s music, it employs certain musicological methods such as analysis of text declamation, musical notation, melodic contour, and rhythmic organization. However, since the study is principally aimed toward a literary readership, such analyses are supplemented with a glossary of musical terms and are conducted in manner intended to be accessible to non-musicologists.