Ioculator seu mimus. Performing Music and Poetry in medieval Iberia

Project Information

MiMus

Grant agreement ID: 772762

DOI

10.3030/772762

Project closed

EC signature date 21 June 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 341 869,00

EU contribution

€ 1 341 869,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MiMus (Ioculator seu mimus. Performing Music and Poetry in medieval Iberia)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the Middle Ages, poetry, singing, and dance flourished mainly within courtly circles, supported by noble and royal patronage. This support generated a wealth of documentation, including payment records and letters, preserved in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona (ACA). These documents reveal valuable insights into the lives of minstrels—their social status as entertainment professionals, their movements, and their participation in public and private events associated with the Crown.

But what do the ACA documents actually tell us about the minstrels of medieval Catalan courts?

To answer this, the MiMus project has compiled, edited, and analyzed an extensive collection of documents about artists who contributed to the musical life of the courts of the kings of the House of Barcelona, spanning from the mid-13th to the mid-15th century. The scale and depth of this corpus enable scholars to address key questions about the creation and dissemination of medieval music and poetry and the role these arts played within royal courts.

This exploration of ACA records is further enriched by analyzing other sources—literary, prescriptive, and iconographic—that help to outline artists’ profiles and the evolution of courtly entertainment. A major outcome of the project is the MiMus DB and the Corpus TOC, which together offer vast amounts of curated data to the scientific community. By making these resources accessible to the public, the project not only advances research but also provides insight into a foundational culture that shapes our understanding of poetry and music today.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The major achievements in the MiMus project include the development of two digital databases, MiMus DB (1) and Corpus TOC (2), and a series of publications (3).

Output 1) The MiMus DB (available at: http://mimus.ub.edu/ca/base-de-dades) offers access to an extensive collection of historical data, including over 1,654 meticulously curated and annotated documents related to artists involved in the musical life of the courts of the kings of the Crown of Aragon. This evidence not only corroborates existing hypotheses derived from the intertextual borrowings and allusions embedded within medieval Occitan, Catalan, and French poetry but also empowers researchers to gain new insights into the creation and reception of lyrical texts. Consulting the documents curated in the MiMus DB proves invaluable, particularly in mitigating the dearth of manuscripts bearing musical notation—a persistent challenge confronting Catalan music historiography. The database serves also as a tool for investigating the relationships among patrons who supported musical activities, demonstrating that in the 14th century, French song in particular, had evolved into an international commodity with the ability to build cultural capital for its sponsors. For these reasons, the MiMus DB stands as a noteworthy scientific achievement, exerting a profound impact on the academic community.

Output 2) The second major output of the project is the Corpus TOC – Occitan-Catalan Treatises related to Las Leys d’Amors (available at: http://tocweb.ovi.cnr.it/). While archival records offer valuable insights into the historical context of musical activity, they often fail to provide specific details about the lyrical repertories and musical styles that were actually performed. Recognizing this limitation, we have developed a lexicon centered on terminology related to poetry, music, and performance. The Corpus TOC, focused on lemmatizing the text of Las Leys d'Amors and other 14th-century Catalan and Occitan treatises, holds the potential to significantly enhance our lexicon and provide critical clues about the nuances and complexities of medieval poetry and music. The lemmatization of the corpus is selective, prioritizing specific semantic fields: 1) Lexicon related to metrics, rhetoric, and literature; 2) Grammatical lexicon; 3) Lexicon relevant to diverse domains such as linguistics, philosophy and law.

Output 3) Among the many publications derived from the project, one can be pointed out: the joint publication Alberni, A. Calvia, M. S. Lannutti (eds.), Polyphonic Voices: Poetic and Musical Dialogues in the European Ars Nova, SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, Firenze, 2021 (xxiv+393 pp). The monograph is the result of a close collaboration between the two ERC projects ArsNova (PI Lannutti) and MiMus. The study of the various forms of intertextuality, conceived as a key to understanding musical and poetic texts of the Middle Ages, represents one of the methodological threads of the ERC projects ArsNova and MiMus: while focusing on different repertoires and cultural environments, and developing independent lines of research, these projects find common ground in the central role of textual analysis, and share the same attention towards the philological implications of any interpretative approach. The studies gathered in this volume reveal the importance of analysing the circuit borrowing-allusion-quotation to interpret poetic and musical texts, and to fully understand their function within the cultural system of late-medieval Europe.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

One of the primary purposes of project MiMus was to allow the academic community to access a body of historical evidence which may corroborate the elements emerging from the complex network of intertextual borrowings and allusions (intertextuality) that characterises Romance medieval poetry. Through the consultation of the archival documents gathered in the MiMus DB, it is possible to get an overview of the context of production and reception of the lyrical texts, which in the case of medieval Catalan poetry are almost always preserved without music. In the first place, these documents reveal the presence at the Catalan-Aragonese court of a significant number of minstrels and musicians, partially filling the void caused by the rarity of manuscripts provided with musical notation, whose scantiness is one of the most puzzling issues faced by the historiography of medieval Catalan music. This is a real progress beyond the state of the art, and it will permit to advance in two directions: 1) towards new editions which enable a better comprehension of the texts and their transmission; and 2) towards a reassessment of already-known pieces in the light of novel documentary or historiographical information in order to establish the place that befits them in fourteenth-century Catalan poetry, including the intertextual networks that place them in specific contexts of production and reception.

The large number of documents discovered and edited by the MiMus project represents an unprecedented challenge for the history of medieval literature and music in the Iberian Peninsula. The scale and depth of these findings have resulted in outcomes that, both in quantity and quality, have surpassed all expectations. As a direct consequence, the MiMus corpus provides unparalleled insights into the realm of court entertainment, offering new data on the social and professional status of artists, their specializations, their movements across Europe, and their intricate relationships with power. It is no exaggeration to claim that editing and analyzing this extensive document corpus establishes the groundwork for charting an entirely new continent of knowledge on medieval music and poetry.

MiMus DB Query interface

Corpus TOC homepage