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"Playing at love and war: songs and other tournaments in Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308"

The beautiful, fragile early-fourteenth-century manuscript of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, copied in Metz in the early 1310s, can be read as a planned compendium of courtly games and pastimes.  Its chansonnier section contains the texts of over 500 songs from the preceding 150 years, arranged by genre.  It includes a section of jeux-partis, within which is copied the earliest group of demandes d'amour (love questions), thought by some to be the oral-conversational basis for the more formalized jeu-parti songs.  These competitive word battles, often between named aristocrats, echo the more physical contests of the manuscript's narrative poems, which present various tournaments (both mêlée fighting and individual jousts) in settings that are variously literary allegory (Huon de Méry's Tournoi de l'Antécrist), vernacular romance (Jacques de Longuyon's Voeux du Paon) and versified historical record (Jacques Bretel's Tournoiement de Chauvency).  These three works attest to the significant role of sound, song, dance, and games within tournaments, as do intertextual links between the refrain citations of Chauvency and the songs in the chansonnier section of Douce 308.  This paper will explore the intersection of the socially entagled courtly cultures of singing and tourneying as attested by Douce 308, and will propose a new theorization of refined loving in the light of ideas of performative violence.