Repetition as Rebirth: A Sung Epitaph for Gautier De Coinci

ABSTRACT:The thirteenth-century prior and poet-musician Gautier de Coinci is known for his extravagant wordplay, which relies on the recursive patterning of verbal sound. This article considers Gautier's penchant for sonic repetition in the light of the music that frames his book of miracles, focusing on the song Por mon chief reconforter, a chanson à refrain written in the voice of an aging Gautier coming to terms with his imminent death. The song's exclusion from Frederic Koenig's standard edition of the Miracles means it has received little scholarly attention, yet its earliest source is linked with Gautier's original exemplar. The article examines how repeated musico-poetic forms—within the stanza, between stanzas, and in the more temporally extended repetition of contrafacture—interact with notions of temporality and mortality voiced in the song's texts and contexts, suggesting that such structures reshape the experience of time into one that is less linear, and therefore less final.

inviting a somatic response. 3 His texts are repetitive not only in their forms but also in their re-iterability (be it aural or virtual, as with an earworm), making them ritualistic in Jonathan Culler's sense of the word-they are 'texts composed for re-performance '. 4 In this way, the recursive sounds of literary diversion are realigned teleologically to serve Gautier's project of conversion; they work on audiences over time, through repetition.
This ritualistic quality extends all the more to the Marian lyrics framing Gautier's two books of Miracles, with their foregrounding of the sonic and somatic aspects of voice inherent in song. The addition of notated lyrics to Gautier's narratives makes it one of the earliest medieval texts to interpolate song with narrative verse, a practice that burgeoned during the thirteenth century with the insertion of vernacular lyrics into romance narratives and the inclusion of a huge range of musical genres and textures within courtly, devotional, allegorical, and other texts of various degrees of generic hybridity. Among the few compilations of this kind to have been composed before the 1240s, Gautier's is musicologically significant for being the first to notate its lyric additions. 5 While other early compilations present their lyrics as short fragments within the main textual body, moreover, Gautier's songs appear as multi-stanzaic wholes outside the Miracles narratives, evoking song as an extended activity in its own right. 6 This musical framing of the narratives is a feature of Gautier's design: his comments within the Miracles on the purpose and progress of his project mark him as one of the first medieval figures to have organized their output systematically in a single-author corpus, and the 114 manuscripts in which it survives (seventeen of which preserve the book as a whole) attest to its vast reception, while signalling its inevitable fluidity as the material product of over two centuries of scribes working within a wide range of religious and aristocratic contexts. 7 Comparing his songs to fragrant flowers, Gautier quips that he 'strews and embellishes' them among his stories in order to 'draw [audiences] away from snoring' (I Pr 2, 31-3), but the songs also serve more edifying functions: not only do they universalize the sentiments of his narratives into the lyric first person, intensifying their personal relevance to listeners; they also offer, in themselves, 'the fulfilment of Marian devotion promised by the 3 I use the term annominatio here to refer to the repetition of homophonic words and phonemes with the same lexical root over several lines of text. 4 Jonathan Culler, Theory of Lyric (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 37. 5 Though no manuscripts survive from Gautier's lifetime, the earliest four-N, D, G, and M-which appear to have emerged before or around the mid-13th c., all contain musical notation. On their early dates, see Alison Stones, 'Notes on the Artistic Context of Some Gautier de Coinci Manuscripts', in Krause and Stones (eds.), Gautier de Coinci, 65-98 at 73-6. The few other interpolated texts known to have been produced before Gautier's death include Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, the first known romance with lyric insertions, a text some scholars have suggested Gautier was familiar with, though this hinges on an early date for the Roman (dates range from 1204 to 1228, though the manuscript itself is from the late 13th or early 14th c.); and the St. Trudperter Hohelied, a text of erotic spirituality with 'songlike interludes', dating from the 1160s (see Barbara Newman, Frauenlob's Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and his Masterpiece (University Park, Pa., 2006), 115). On the relation between the Miracles and Jean Renart's Roman, see Margaret Switten, 'Borrowing, Citation, and Authorship', in Virginie Elisabeth Green (ed.), The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature (New York, 2006), 29-59 at 40 and Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002), 111-15. 6 The songs' musical layout resembles that of the northern French chansonniers, and there was probably some overlap in the scribes who produced both kinds of sources: one Miracles manuscript (MS o) goes so far as to introduce Gautier's first cluster of songs erroneously as the work of Thibaut de Champagne, the high-ranking trouvère with whose songs the chansonniers often begin. See Butterfield,Poetry and Music,34. Miracles', as Michelle Bolduc has shown. 8 Gautier exhorts his readers to sing 'devoutly, in an elevated manner, and solemnly, night and day, of the lady who brings all those who take care to serve her' (II Mir 21,, the singers' thoughts gradually moving from the songs themselves 'up to heaven' ('as doz chanz dou ciel lassus') (II Mir 21,325) to 'meld with and join' ('se melle et joint') the unceasing song of the saints (II Mir 21,335).
The importance of process in Gautier's Miracles, and particularly in his music, raises the question of how the specific elements of his songs unfold through the process of musical time. How do the melodies of Gautier's lyrics shape and interact with his recursive textual structures? This article addresses these questions through a close reading of one of the Miracles' songs, a little-known chanson à refrain called Por mon chief reconforter (hereafter Por mon chief ). 9 My reading is interdisciplinary, focusing on how repeated musico-poetic forms interact with notions of temporality and mortality voiced in the song's texts and contexts. Repetition is considered here on three levels of temporal proximity: patterns of pitch and phoneme within the stanza; formal repetition between stanzas; and the more temporally extended repetition of contrafacture.
Gautier's use of contrafacture is well known: his lyrics borrow and adapt their melodies from widely disseminated courtly songs, conducti, and liturgical music, which cue in the knowing listener a return to the melody's previous texts and contexts while overwriting them with new layers of lyric text. 10 This produces what Ardis Butterfield has called a 'doubleness': 11 in the Miracles' re-texted courtly songs, desire for the idealized courtly lady is rewritten into desire for the most idealized lady of all, Mary, while the melody's courtly origins are never fully erased, holding its intertexts in tension. Gautier's contrafacture thus acts as a point of confluence of different cultural landscapes, blurring lines long reified in modern scholarship between sacred and secular, 'high' and 'low', a reflection of the vast generic diversity of his influences more generally.
Individual instances of contrafacture in the Miracles are rarely discussed in detail, however, and much less so as integrated musico-poetic wholes whose melodies not only reiterate previous texts and contexts, but also act as determinants of anticipation and emphasis as they unfold sonically. While the temporally displaced repetition of contrafacture often brings out the object-like nature of song (its existence as an abstract whole, a remembered 'identity' that is the basis of the old song's recognition), contrafacta also play with expectations over the course of their performance, based on a continuous divergence of sound and sense between the old and new song (same, sounding musico-poetic form; different semantics). 12 Both 'process' and 'product' in Nicholas Cook's sense therefore contribute to a contrafact's meaning, and, rather than being discrete entities, they are, as Cook notes in more modern contexts, often merged: the previously known song's identity (its product) colours the expectations played out as the contrafact progresses in performance (its process The continuum between 'process' and 'product' is useful for thinking about repetition not just between, but also within songs. 14 This is because repetition, at least in traditional formulations, relies on identity (the 'sameness' of the thing repeated, a remembered and therefore trans-temporal entity akin to Cook's product), yet is only made meaningful in time (process). In medieval song, this tension is seen in certain scribal strategies for saving parchment-the fact that notated music only accompanies the first strophe of text, and in the reduction of each refrain's reiteration to a textual cue of a few words. As a written musico-poetic text, a 'recipe' (Paul Valéry), 'script' (Cook), or 'schedule of performance' (Elizabeth Eva Leach), the repeated object is functionally 'the same' and thus rendered redundant. 15 But in performance, such repetition cannot be made redundant in the same way, because it works on listener and performer through time, in changing conditions, and at different degrees of familiarity and imagined (or sonic) participation, or (indeed) boredom. By repeating formal structures within the song, textual identities of 'sameness' are simultaneously affirmed-in the listener's recognition of previous material or attunement to the rhythms of repetitionand dissolved, as the passing of time makes everything new, constantly shifting the position of the observer and creating space for the gradations of the performer.
This thinking is relevant for Por mon chief both in the light of its refrain form, which, with its cyclical recurrence of refrain text and music, as well as the strophic melody in between, epitomizes the tensions between reiteration and linear progress that characterize Gautier's project more broadly; but also in the analysis of repeated pitches within each stanza, which, in a repertory that has neither systematic explanations of its own musical grammar nor consistent indications of rhythm and duration, provide some of the only indications of a pitch's relative gravity or prominence.

A SONG OUTSIDE THE MIRACLES' MAINSTREAM
Por mon chief is relatively unknown among modern scholars. Frederic Koenig's edition of the Miracles omits the song based on the fact that of the Miracles' 114 extant sources, it appears in only two: M and o. 16 Manuscript M has close links with Gautier, however, it being the Miracles' earliest securely dated source, signed and dated to 1266 by its scribe at the Benedictine monastery of Morigny, not far from Gautier's monastery of Saint-Médard at Soissons. 17 Arlette P. Ducrot-Granderye also considered it the closest to Gautier's original text. 18 In addition to Gautier's usual epilogue about sending his text to Abbot Robert of Dive to be illustrated, M contains a Latin rubric outlining the same intention, signalling a potential link with Gautier's original exemplar. 19 As one of few notated manuscripts from the mid-thirteenth century that are securely dated, M also has much to offer for the history of musical notation. 20 Yet, with only two miniatures-full-page, prefatory illustrations that diverge stylistically from all other Miracles sources-and with only six Marian lyrics included out of the usual eighteen, it tends to be overshadowed by more extensively illustrated, 'finished' Miracles manuscripts. 21 If M is, as Stones has suggested, 'a fair copy of Gautier's plain original' as opposed to the fully illustrated copies ordered from that original, Por mon chief might seem like a song that never quite made it into the main Miracles 'text'. Indeed, some commentators have excluded it from their discussions on this basis. 22 But, setting aside the acknowledged problems of extracting an urtext of songs out of this diverse manuscript tradition, and of the apparent necessity for them to be 'authentic' in order to receive attention, Por mon chief 's reappearance in o, dated by Stones to 1280-90, means the song had a life beyond copies of Gautier's exemplar. 23 Manuscript o's intriguing 'fake' musical notation, written below each line of text on two stave lines, precludes it from being used in musical transcription, however, so the examples that follow are based on M. 24 Despite this questioning of Por mon chief's authorship, the song is, ironically, one of the most autobiographical in tone of Gautier's lyrics, written in the voice of an aging Gautier coming to terms with his own impending death. 25 Like a florilegium, it weaves together several of the autobiographical claims and distinctive flourishes Gautier makes elsewhere in the Miracles, taking his penchant for self-citation to a new level. 26 Whether or not Gautier composed the song, the way in which it mimics and extends the authorial voice that surrounds it codicologically is worth noting, and is discussed further below. 19 The rubric on fo. 198 r reads: 'Incipit epistola domini galteri qui misit librum istum domino roberto de diva, priore sancti blasii, postea abbate sancti eligii noviomensis' ('Here begins the letter of Lord Gautier who sent this book to Lord Robert of Dive, Prior of Saint Blaise, thereafter the Abbot of Saint-Eloi of Noyon'). 20 This has been previously noted by Mark Everist in his review of Kathy Krause and Alison Stones (eds.), 'Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts', Speculum, 84 (2009), 464-5 at 464. 21 On the two prefatory miniatures, see Stones, 'Notes on the Artistic Context', 66-72. 22 Following Koenig, neither Hunt nor O'Sullivan includes the song in their respective studies of Gautier's lyrics, Hunt noting that the song is 'sometimes attributed to Gautier' (Miraculous Rhymes, 82 n. 15). Jacques Chailley, however, did include it, arguing for the song's authenticity based on its text's elaboration of 'themes chers a Gautier', such as Gautier's oft-repeated claim that he writes a new song to the Virgin every year. Chailley suggests that the song text's emphasis on Gautier's old age may indicate why it evaded wider circulation: other exemplars of the Miracles had perhaps already been sent out for illustration and annotation by the time Gautier reached the final stages of his life. This is partly why he dates the song to the year of Gautier's death, 1236. . 26 Hunt has shown that most of Gautier's song texts display some degree of citation or quotation within and between each other (Hunt,Miraculous Rhymes,90). Por mon chief's self-quotation and paraphrase is particularly dense, however, and, unlike most of Gautier's other lyrics, it takes as its main object what Anna Drzewicka has characterized as Gautier's je-écrivain, the writerly voice that stands outside the narrative (see her 'Le Livre ou la voix: Le moi poétique dans les Miracles de Notre Dame de Gautier de Coinci', Le Moyen Â ge, 96 (1990), 245-63).

ANALYSING POR MON CHIEF
The chanson à refrain form-where musically identical stanzas with changing texts alternate with a musically and textually unchanging refrain-is common among the medieval vernacular song repertories in general and the Miracles in particular. Five of the eighteen songs commonly ascribed to Gautier are refrain songs. 27 Musically, his refrains stand out for their use of melismas, a relatively uncommon feature in both Old French and Latin refrains. As will be discussed below, these repeated melismas appear to be an instance of a less typical structure adopted specifically to bring out aspects of Gautier's wordplay. But, as Andreas Haug has shown, even more typical forms of repetition, like the chanson à refrain itself, can produce a variety of noteworthy effects, for example in the musico-poetic relation of refrain to stanza, or the voicing and pacing of the refrain within the song, which can be interruptive, invocative, or consolidatory, to name just a few functions. 28 Such diversity is belied by the chanson à refrain's typological unity, which has been emphasized by the formalist concerns of earlier scholarship on trouvère song.
This earlier focus of song analysis on genre and large-scale structure reflects not only the formalism of early twentieth-century scholars of lyric, but also medieval treatises of lyric, written generations after the first trouvère songs were performed, whose discussion of melody is mainly confined to its generic suitability. 29 With few consistent indications of rhythm and no commentaries on their musical construction, trouvère songs are not easy to analyse. This methodological difficulty, along with the view that 'lack of sophistication in the form of the melody [is] typical', has discouraged the analysis of song melodies within the level of the poetic line, although the detailed case studies of, for example, John Stevens, Fiona McAlpine, Helen Deeming, and Elizabeth Eva Leach have formed important exceptions, and a new cohort of scholars is bringing further changes to the field. 30 Some earlier studies have attempted to configure melody in terms of mode, but the extent to which vernacular song is modal is unclear. While many song notators, with their use of the notational conventions of chant, would have been aware of modality 27 This number does not include Gautier's one chanson avec des refrains (2 Ch 7), a genre involving the quotation of one or more musico-poetic fragments that circulate independently in a variety of Old French literary and musical material, and whose recurrence is therefore across (rather than within a given piece of) such material. D'une amour quoie et serie (2 Ch 5, included in the count above) has its refrain at the end of each strophe, maintaining the strophe's rhyme scheme. 28  (and certainly a Benedictine like Gautier was), the notion that the trouvères composed within this system (knowingly or unknowingly) is less obvious, and is somewhat undermined by Johannes de Grocheio's claim that 'Non enim per tonum cognoscimus cantum vulgarem' ('We cannot know [recognize] vernacular song through its [plainchant] tone'), though the reliability of Grocheio's treatise is also open to debate. 31 The problem of 'tonality' is compounded by the fact that what may appear to be an important sonority in the opening sections of a song can then shift as the song progresses, the 'tone goal' may seem to pivot between two or more pitches, the last pitch may not at all reflect the apparently important sonorities that precede it, and the song's variants may seem to favour other patterns of emphasis, all of which, particularly without any notated melodic accompaniment, make hierarchical classifications of pitch difficult. It is for this reason that any large-scale meta-analysis of the musical norms of this repertory, though sorely needed, must be informed by case studies that document the distinctive internal musical context set up by each song. My analysis, then, considers Por mon chief heuristically, on its own terms, both within and beyond the level of the stanza, with an eye to the chanson à refrain as a specific case rather than just a type.

POR MON CHIEF WITHIN THE STANZA
Por mon chief's overarching musical structure within the stanza is typical of northern French song-bar form, or ABABX, where in this case X can be further broken down to CDCD 0 (see Ex. 1). Here, as is often the case with bar form, the ABAB section (frons) introduces a pair of simple musical phrases, limited in tessitura, whose range is then extended in the more elaborate phrases of the X (cauda) section. 32 But the song begins with a more compact series of repetitions in the first four lines: relatively unusually for a trouvère melody, the pitch content of the A lines is identical to those of the B lines except for their open and closed endings of e and c-d respectively. 33 This shared pitch content is itself recursive in that it centres on a palindromic arc from d to f back to d, lines 2 and 4 being full-out palindromes. 34 The song thus opens with a simple but unusually tightly wound series of repetitions and inversions, moving away from and back to d, bounded by the close range of a fourth, which gives the impression of circularity or oscillation back and forth, particularly when extended over multiple stanzas, but which also heightens the perception of novelty of the elevated range and opposite directionality (stepwise down a fifth in this case) that are common features of the X section.
Yet any sense of circularity in the first four lines is complemented by the pull of the stanza's alternate open and closed endings, which are themselves established through repetition on a smaller scale. As noted above, given the underprescriptive nature of song notation, one way of establishing a pitch's relative gravity is through its repetition over the course of the song's performance, which increasingly casts that pitch as a 31 See Robert Mullaly, 'Johannes de Grocheio's "Musica Vulgaris"', Music & Letters, 79 (1998), 1-26. 32 On the range of and relation between the frons and cauda sections of trouvère song more generally, see Mason, 'Structure and Process', 55-9. 33 In the trouvère repertory, the A and B lines of the frons section typically complement each other in their directionality or range, though significant overlap between them has been seen in other cases, such as in the recitation-like song A vous amant, plus k'a nul'autre gent (RS679) attributed to the Chastelain de Couci. Por mon chief's trouvère contrafact, Chanter et renvoisier sueil (RS1001), shows more differentiation between A and B sections (see Appendix 3). 34 Musical palindromes are found in other trouvère songs, most notably those of Blondel de Nesle, but are rarely as densely repeated as they are here. point of reference. The gesture of return to d in the first three pitches of the song, and again as the fulcrum for directional changes bordering the line's palindromic centre, provides an increasing sense, as the first line unfolds, that d is taking on a gravity of its own, so that a move away from the pitch in the A-line is heard as an 'opening', a pull generated by the expectation of d's return at the beginning of the next line. The Bline's ending is then 'closed' by virtue of its subsequent return to d. 35 The pitch content shared between lines A and B is transformed and distinguished by their different endings; the end of line B casts line A's material, retrospectively, in a new light. In this way, the song's linear trajectory, though propelled forward by difference, also relies on the 'sameness' of repetition to heighten the perception of change, and to establish the prominent sonorities against which change is measured. The effect of this musical structure is both one of being pulled forward to the next line at 'open' Ex. 1. Text, music, and translation of Por mon chief's first stanza endings, and of oscillating back and forth, within the line in the AB sections and between the lines, from open to closed, throughout the stanza.
This longer periodicity of two poetic lines, established by each pair of open and closed endings, is synchronized with the song's versification structure, 7a7b7a7b7a7-b7a7b. The sense of difference between open and closed endings is thus reinforced by the oxytonic rhymes that accompany them, while the difference between pitch and phoneme is collapsed at each line ending into the sound of tones formed indispensably through their respective vowels. This is particularly notable on the syllable -port, which occurs at alternate line endings (lines 3, 5, and 7), always on the prominent pitch d, and is followed by an open e or c on its -er rhyme ending. The sonic likeness between these endings pulls retrospectively into their wake the assonant ending of the first line (-forter), and the syllable por that begins lines 1 and 2, all of which also occur on d and thus serve to foreshadow the pattern.
Such musical-poetic emphasis on -port and -por is apt, given Por mon chief's immediate codicological context: the song's wordplay is actually an extension of the annominatio on -port that concludes Gautier's prologue to the second book (2 Pr II). In M, Por mon chief appears at the end of a cycle of three songs directly following that prologue, the other two being the more widely disseminated Por conforter mon cuer et mon corage (I Ch 9) and Puis que vois la fleur novele. 36 The first of these, I Ch 9, also extends the prologue's wordplay on por, and shares several textual phrases with Por mon chief. 37 Both songs, moreover, adapt the final passage's themes into their first stanzas. The prologue's passage reads as follows: Ançoys que dou livre secont riens vos die ne riens vos cont, talens me prent que de li chant et novel dit et novel chant.
Pour vos esbatre et deporter, et por mon chief reconforter, chanter en veil par grant deport, car en ses chans mout me deport. En ses doz chans a deport tant que je m'i vois mout deportant. En li servir qui se deporte dou ciel a s'ame oevre la porte. Que cele ou tant de deport a, Que toz depors nuef moys porta, a la fin toz nos daint porter en paradys por deporter. Or entendez par grant deport Comment pour li je me deport (II Pr 1, vv. 393-410) Before I tell you or recount to you anything of the second book, a desire seizes me to sing both new ditties and new songs about her. To delight and amuse you and to comfort my head, I want to sing of her with great delight, for in these songs I take great delight. In these sweet songs there's such joy that I get quite carried away in them. Whoever delights in serving her, she opens the gate of heaven to their souls. For she in whom there is so much joy, who carried all joy for nine months, ultimately deigns to carry all of us to Paradise to rejoice. Now listen, with great delight, to how I delight on account of her! By repeating the syllable port, the prologue's wordplay destabilizes the relation between sound and meaning, giving the phoneme a semantically detached, babbling quality, but also emphasizing the web of phonological differences through which meanings are conferred onto it. A desire to be 'carried away' (deport) stands alongside images of the virgin 'carrying' (porter) both Christ into the world and the blessed back to Christ, showing them the 'gate' (porte) of heaven. 38 This particularly dense wordplay is a recurrent feature at the end of each of Gautier's miracles and prologues, which Gautier himself calls the queue (tail). An appendix to, rather than vital component of, the text that precedes it, the queue functions to delight and edify through a kind of aural digression, as Marie Geneviève Grossel notes, representing 'the formidable leap of one who takes the miracle as a springboard for eloquence' ('le formidable rebond de qui a choisi le miracle comme tremplin de la belle éloquence'). 39 Its extension into song is not anomalous here: in the prologue to the first book (I Pr 2), the final passage's annominatio on chant spills over into the song that follows, Amors, qui seit bien enchanter (I Ch 3). In both books' prologues, then, the repetitiveness of the phoneme foregrounds the contingency of linguistic meaning on sound, and brings an excess of vocality to the surface just as the manuscript transitions into song. 40 By transplanting the prologue's call-tosong into an actual song, Por mon chief performs its own paratext. Song is cast as a salutary force, its function being to 'delight and amuse' and comfort Gautier's head, a reference to the recurrent headaches that plague his writerly persona, while the prologue's rhythmic language anticipates the physicality of this delight. 41 II Pr 1's depiction of Mary as 'portal' between heaven and earth, as bearer of both the unborn Christ and the dead, is extended not only into Por mon chief's first stanza, but also its refrain, shown in Ex. 2. Here, the root lexeme port and its echo in the phoneme por sit precariously between sense and nonsense, generating a question: Dame, qui comportas nuef mois tot nostre deport, por ce por coi me deport, que le fil deu portas? (R1.1-4) My lady, you who bore all our delight for nine months, why do I delight that you carried the Son of God?
The musical setting of port and por changes here, but so does the versification (a chiastic 6c-7d-7d-6c) and distribution of pitches. Although the refrain establishes itself in relation to the stanza with an immediate repetition of line 8's descent from f, as well as by maintaining precisely the stanza's range of pitches, the refrain seems to shift emphasis from d to f: f has already been foregrounded as the upper limit of the stanza's palindromes, but now, after the consecutive repetitions of the refrain's first line, it becomes a temporary tone goal in the opening gesture of the second line. Port is emphasized in the open and closed oxytonic endings of the inner lines of the refrain's chiastic poetic structure (lines 2 and 3), both of which are approached by a stepwise descent of a fourth. But its most obvious form of musical emphasis is the placement of portas (carried) on the refrain's melisma, a musical feature probably borrowed from the song's conductus contrafact. 42 Literally 'bearing' its text, the melisma modifies the flow of the largely unadorned phrases preceding it and draws further attention to itself with each reiteration.
In conducti, as Mark Everist has shown, melismatic sections provide a stylistic contrast with syllabic, neumatic, and other sections that can function, for example, to underpin the structure of the poetry, to set up their own expressive patterns of symmetry or numerical proportion, or, in some cases, to draw out parallelisms between phonemes. 43 This last feature seems to be a tendency of Gautier's refrain melismas, and is all the more striking given the relative rarity of melismatic sections in the refrains of both Old French song and conducti, which contrasts with the high incidence of them in Miracles: of the Miracles' six chansons à refrain (including Por mon chief ), four contain refrain melismas, two of these being contrafacta of one of the only well-known melismatic refrain conducti, Beata viscera. 44 In addition to Por mon chief, the melismas of two of these refrain songs-Hui matin a l'ajournee (2 Ch 6) and Entendez tuit ensemble (2 Ch 36)-coincide with aspects of Gautier's wordplay and rhymes. The latter, Entendez tuit ensemble, extends melismatically Gautier's wordplay on the traditional EVA/AVE anagram linking Eve to Mary, while Hui matin a l'ajournee links the rhymes o, mot, and (in two sources) Marot with melismas. 45 This -ot rhyme sound, preserved from the corresponding hocket sections of Hui matin's motet contrafacta, is also the locus of Gautier's wordplay: introducing its claims 'in a word' ('tout a un mot'), the refrain summarizes the abandonment of virtue for vice as leaving 'Marie for Marot', implying, through a pun on 'tout a un mot', that the line between good and evil rests 'on a word' or, rather, a vowel sound (-ot)-a sound that these melismas cannily emphasize. 46 Por mon chief's foregrounding of port in the relatively uncommon form of a refrain melisma expands Gautier's question into more than just a whimsical marvelling at his own emotional response to contemplation ('why do I delight that you carried (portas) the son of God?'); it hints at its own answer by drawing attention to, and thus cuing the web of meanings associated with, the prologue's annominatio-portas (carried), porte (gate of heaven), deport (delight)-whose linguistic relation underlines their soteriological significance (there would be no 'gate' of heaven had Mary not 'carried' Christ). As the song progresses, Por mon chief takes this underlying verbal-theological relation between Mary's pregnancy and the possibility of salvation and frames it not only as the object of Gautier's contemplation, but also as having an immediate bearing on his own life.

POR MON CHIEF BETWEEN STANZAS: INTERRUPTING THE END WITH A BEGINNING
The textual theme of Gautier's ailing head is expanded in the stanzas that follow into a reflection on the breakdown of his aging body, so that the refrain's imminent birth is juxtaposed with the narrator's imminent death. This is first introduced in the second stanza: Mere Dieu, des mon jovent chasc'an te doi noveau son Je t'ai bien tenu covent tant que none ou vespres son. Vers la fin trai durement par tens, ce croi, dira on,  Gautier's life is depicted here using both teleological and cyclical imagery. He is approaching the end, a fact emphasized rhetorically by the melody's shift up in tessitura at line 5; yet the comparison with the liturgical cycle of the hours-being in the none and vespers of life-suggests that this ending may fold over into a beginning. 47 The reference to Gautier's practice of making a new song to the Virgin every year frames even his creative output within the terms of cycle and ritual, while the fear of being thought senile ('this good man rambles on!') offers an ironic take on the wordplay of the refrain that follows. The nod to Gautier's habit of making a 'new song' calls to mind the canticum novum of the Psalms, and draws on multiple references to this practice in other sections of the Miracles. 48 Along with the first stanza's adaptation of the prologue, this reference is part of a dense collection of internal Miracles quotations within the song, which make it into something of a patchwork auto-epitaph. (For the full text, music, and translation of Por mon chief, see Appendix 1.) Stanzas 3 and 4 resemble Gautier's claims elsewhere in the Miracles of 'not giving a berry' about the slanderers who criticize his rhymes, while stanzas 5 and 6 echo lines from other Miracles songs. 49 Stanzas 5 and 6 also emphasize Gautier's reliance on his aging body in praising the Virgin: in stanza 5 Gautier pledges that his acts of praise will last as long as he is able to 'open his eyes' and 'move his tongue' (3.5-8), while stanza 6 describes Gautier's ongoing devotion despite his 'growing old' and 'coming to his end': Fleurs d'aiglentier, fleurs de lis ja por ce, s'a ma fin vois, ne por ce, se j'envellis, ne lairoi; ne me renvois por t'amor, don sui espris Ne pris mais le monde un pois J'ai grant droit, se le despris, car n'i a point de cras pois (6.1-8). 47 The reference also reflects the divine office's role not only in providing a temporal structure for the day, but in 'transforming [the monk's] whole life into an office by temporal scansion' as Giorgio Agamben has put it, the monastic ideal being a 'total mobilization of existence through time', so that the monk's life becomes a divine work (see Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, Calif., 2013), 21 and 23). 48 See, for example, Psalm 96 (Psalm 97 in the RV). Gautier's persona's claim that he has kept the covenant 'from his youth' also evokes Psalm 70:17-18 (Psalm 71 in the RV): 'Deus, docuisti me a iuventute mea, et usque nunc pronuntiabo mirabilia tua; et usque in senectam et senium, Deus, ne derelinquas me, donec adnuntiem bracchium tuum generationi omni quae ventura est' (Thou hast taught me, O God, from my youth: and till now I will declare thy wonderful works. And unto old age and grey hairs: O God, forsake me not, until I shew forth thy arm to all the generation that is to come). 49 For Gautier's comments on his slanderers within the Miracles, see II Pr 1, vv. 111-19. The fifth stanza's standard association of honey imagery ('mielz') with Mary echoes similar references in 1 Ch 5, 1.10 and 1.25 and II Ch 8, 6.3, and references to damnation in the seventh and eighth stanzas resemble references to the damned in the latter stanzas of many of Gautier's other songs. I will never abandon the Rose and the Lily, neither on account of coming to my end nor on account of growing old; do not send me away because of [my] love for you, which inflames me. I no longer rate the world more than a pea and am absolutely right to disparage it, for there is no blubber at all/no profitable burden.
With characteristic punning, the last three lines condemn the world as being both unrewarding of its burdens and like peas without whale blubber, a reference to the medieval Lenten dish of craspois, salted whale blubber served with peas-the sense being that the world is less fulfilling than an already meagre meal without its most satiating part. 50 Embedded in line 5 are the words 'amor dont sui espris', which quote the incipit of both Gautier's song Amors, dont sui espris (II Ch 4) and a grant chant by Blondel de Nesle with the same incipit and melody (RS 1545). The stanza's opening reference to the wild rose and the lily, which appears verbatim in I Ch 9 and II Ch 8, is a wellknown epithet for Mary; yet in the context of Gautier's death and the earlier reference to his tongue it also recalls scenes from two of his miracles stories, both of which belong to the 'lily-miracles' type, in which lilies or roses-roses in Gautier's versionsspring from the grave of a person devoted to Mary and are then found to be rooted in their tongue. 51 As Laurel Broughton has shown, the lily is found in medieval images of the Annunciation as a symbol not only of Mary's purity but also of the incarnate Christ, the 'blossom that grows out of the root of Jesse'. The logic of the type is that anyone who says their Ave Marias, and thereby quotes the angel's words to Mary that constitute the first half of the prayer, participates verbally in the Annunciation and thus invites Christ to be born in them, most significantly when they die, as shown with the lily (or rose) on the tongue that performed the prayer. 52 Though these stories are only evoked obliquely in this stanza (if at all), their linking of death with life-both the incarnate life of Christ and its promise for the 'excarnate' soul-echoes that of Por mon chief's chanson à refrain structure, with its return to Mary's pregnancy.
This juxtaposition of death and life, heard until now between stanzas, is addressed more directly within Por mon chief's seventh stanza, where the narrator spurns his aging, corruptible flesh, 'which dies like a pig' ('qui muert com un pors'), in favour of the soul, which lives 'sanz terme et sanz fin' (without term and without end): Mere Deu, se mes las cors afebloie et desperit et envielit par defors, renouvele l'esperit. La chars, qui muert com un pors, ne puet chaloir quant devit; mais a l'ame est li tresors qui sanz terme et sanz fin vit (7.1-8). Mother of God, although my poor body, enfeebled and dispirited and aged in its appearance, renews its spirit, the flesh, which dies like a pig, cannot warm when it dies, but in the soul is the treasure which lives without [a fixed] term and without end.
By surrounding these stanzas about Gautier's death with a refrain about Christ's birth, the song's structure evokes the Pauline notion of the death of the self as coinciding with one's rebirth in Christ. As the narrator becomes increasingly alienated from his own body, the refrain contemplates the maternal body, from which a new life in Christ can emerge. The texts of each stanza, whose difference is foregrounded against the backdrop of their formal and melodic sameness, focus on the toll of time's passing, while the refrain offers a continuous return to a moment of potentiality.
As shown above, aspects of the stanzas' texts also point towards instances in which a return to the past is understood as merging with or influencing the present: the liturgical cycle of monastic time mentioned in stanza 2-whose shape is so ingrained that the narrator metaphorizes it onto the structure of his life-as well as the lily miracle stories loosely evoked in stanza 5-whose protagonists, in re-enacting the moment of the incarnation, cause it to recur in their own lives as well as beyond their graves-turn the contemplation of past events into devotional acts with time-bending consequences: they make the past literally come alive in the present. Por mon chief gestures towards something similar in its own, playful rumination on the incarnation-the possibility that revisiting, yet again, the scene of Mary's pregnancy might invite a new incarnation that is also a resurrection. The linking of these two kinds of births-incarnation and resurrection-is found elsewhere in medieval religious culture, for example in visual depictions of recently departed souls as newborn babies, or the text of the Marian antiphon Regina caeli laetare, which associates Christ's resurrection with Mary's pregnancy. 53

POR MON CHIEF'S CONTRAFACTA
This discussion of aging and pregnant bodies is made all the more significant by the fact that one of the song's two contrafacta, the refrain conductus Sol sub nube latuit (hereafter Sol sub nube), is a meditation on the uncorrupted nature of Mary's body, and of the Godhead, in the Incarnation. (For the full text, music, and translation of Sol sub nube, see Appendix 2.) This is reinforced didactically by Sol sub nube's refrain text, which reads 'Gaude nova nupta! Fides est et veritas, / quod a carne deitas / non fuit corrupta' (Rejoice, new bride! It is the faith and it is the truth that the deity was not corrupted by the flesh)-an apt counterpart to the increasingly corrupted state of Gautier's flesh. Sol sub nube is notated in three extant sources, W 1 , F, and Sankt Gallen 383, each of which is voiced in two parts, the lower voice (tenor) comprising the melody found in Por mon chief. The earliest of these sources, W 1 , is dated to the 1230s and therefore contemporary with Gautier's lifetime   in unnotated sources from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which shows that the conductus's text, at least, preceded the Miracles. 55 The question of Sol sub nube's musical priority is less clear. The direction of compositional influence for music from this period often remains opaque: the dating of manuscripts (which itself only provides a terminus ante quem for the music), notational features, authorial attributions (which often do not specify whether it is the text, music, or some combination of the two that is attributable), biographical records, and elements of style typically function interdependently as pieces of evidence; thus it is difficult to make an argument that avoids circularity. While no single detail proves Sol sub nube as the original musical context for Por mon chief's melody, circumstantial evidence points in that direction. Gautier's extensive borrowing is well known and broadly accepted by scholars: 56 beyond his literary reworkings, at least two of the concordances for his melodies-the Laetabundus sequence and the responsory chant Gaude Maria Virgo-existed well before the Miracles and therefore must function as models for his songs; in the former, the Latin text of the sequence's cauda is preserved verbatim within Gautier's version, clearly signalling it as a reworking. 57 Gautier's own comments on the conductus ('li conduis Notre Dame', as he calls it) show he was aware of the genre, and four of his other songs have conductus contrafacta. 58 Por mon chief's cauda, moreover, is much more typical of a conductus (though rarer in a refrain form) than what is seen elsewhere in the devotional vernacular songs of northern France. And, in the early text-only sources St-Omer 351 (first half of the 13th c.) and Bodleian Add.A44 (early 13th c.), Sol sub nube appears as part of a group of poems commonly attributed on the basis of style to Walter of Châtillon (d. 1201), two of which show evidence of being sung by the end of the twelfth century. 59 These two poems, Ecce torpet probitas and Licet eger cum egrotis, appear side by side in the Carmina burana, a thirteenth-century source that preserves twelfth-century material, where they are un-neumed but among other neumed songs, and in the so-called 'Later Cambridge Songbook', dating from the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, where the former is notated in one voice and the latter overlaid with musical staves for one voice but unnotated. 60 In fact many of the other poems surrounding Sol sub nube in Bodleian Add.A44 have musical concordances: a notable twenty-seven of them are found notated in F. 61 Though the priority of these other musical settings cannot be established, they nevertheless serve as a reminder that the texts of these 'text-only' collections may well have functioned as musical cues for what were already sung conducti. 62 The picture is complicated by Por mon chief's other contrafact, the trouvère song Chanter et renvoisier sueil. In cases where Gautier's songs have one musical contrafact, the contrafact is generally assumed to have been Gautier's model, but the presence of a third contrafact in the group allows for a more complex process of borrowing. Three sources contain Chanter et renvoisier sueil's only attribution, which is to Thibaut de Blaison (fl. 1214-29), the senéschal of Poitou, whose authorship would place the song's composition squarely within Gautier's lifetime. 63 Por mon chief's relation to the song is unclear, but given Gautier's extensive reference to the forms and conventions of courtly literature and the fact that eight of the songs attributed to him have at least one contrafact from the trouvère corpus, it would not be surprising if he was aware of it. In none of its extant sources does Chanter et renvoisier sueil have either a refrain or a melisma, so Por mon chief could not have relied solely on it. What is suggested by a comparative musical transcription of the sources, rather, is a link between Chanter et renvoisier sueil and Sol sub nube.  (1885), 582-5. In the 12th-c. source Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung, Phill.MS 1996, Sol sub nube's text is added by a contemporary hand into the empty spaces of writings attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux. The only other poem in the source, written in the same hand, is Sacerdotes mementote, which also appears in the Carmina burana. The rubricator's red initialling of the first letter of each stanza and refrain of both poems within what is otherwise a prose configuration of the text privileges the stanza over the poetic line-that is, the musical unit of repetition over the metrical one-and resembles the layout of the latter stanzas in chansonniers, or of songs in text-only collections like Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce 308. Given the variety of layout styles for Latin poetry of this period, sometimes even within one manuscript, this cannot prove the musicality of the poems, but it would aid a singer in distinguishing where the melody begins and ends. 62 Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne, in a recent paper, 'Is a Conductus without Music a Conductus: Some Reflections on the Poetic Sources' (from the conference Ars Antiqua IV, Lucca, 2018), has suggested that the layout of certain poetic sources, including Bodleian Add.A44, reveals aspects of the conductus's musicality. Likewise, an argument for text as musical cue has been made in Elizabeth Eva Leach, 'A Courtly Compilation: The Douce Chansonnier', in Deeming and Leach (eds.), Manuscripts and Medieval Song, 221-46 at 233. 63 For the list of primary sources mentioning Thibaut de Blaison through which his identity is determined, see Thibaut de Blaison, Les Poésies de Thibaut de Blaison, ed. T. H. Newcombe (Geneva, 1978), 15-20. Chanter et renvoisier sueil (RS1001) is found in the following northern French chansonniers: Paris 5198 (TrouvK), pp. 125-6; Paris, BnF, fr. 845 (TrouvN), fo. 74 r-v ; n.a.fr. 1050 (TrouvX), fos. 87 v -88 r ; fr. 847 (TrouvP), fos. 152 v -153 r ; fr. 846 (TrouvO), fos. 25 v -26 r ; and fr. 24406 (TrouvV), fo. 81 r-v , the first three listed here containing the attribution to Thibaut. Aside from the anomalous reading typical of Paris, BnF fr. 24406, the musical transmission is extremely uniform across all sources, the first four (TrouvKNXP) being known for their probable origins in a common exemplar. For this reason, Appendix 3 contains only one manuscript reading of the song, from Paris 5198.
In fact the two vernacular songs (Chanter et renvoisier sueil and Por mon chief ) resemble different versions of Sol sub nube more than they do each other. This is particularly clear in the B line of the opening ABAB section (see Ex. 3), where Chanter et renvoisier sueil's elaborations from E to C on the first syllable resemble those in Sankt Gallen 383's version of Sol sub nube. Sankt Gallen 383's reading diverges from that of F and W 1 in several respects, not least in its different duplum voice, which nevertheless merges with F's and W 1 's dupla at the refrain (see the refrain in Appendix 4's comparative transcription). Sankt Gallen 383's tenor's and Chanter et renvoisier sueil's melody's elaborations on the first syllable of poetic line 2 may, in either or both cases, originate from the duplum of other versions of Sol sub nube in an aural confusion of the melodic line with its upper part. This is suggested by the dupla of F and W 1 , which descend from F to D in the first two syllables of the line, as shown with the arrows in Ex. 3. If this is the case, Sankt Gallen 383's tenor would have to have been influenced independently of, or chronologically prior to, its unique duplum, as the duplum itself bears little resemblance to that of F and W 1 at this point in the song. Given that such a descent from F to D is not an uncommon kind of variation in medieval song, the motif may simply be an ornamentation unrelated to W1's and F's dupla. What is clear is the link between Sankt Gallen 383 and Chanter et renvoisier sueil: the tenor of the former could have influenced Chanter et renvoisier sueil directly, or conversely-if Sol sub nube's melody arose after its text and within Thibaut's lifetime-been derived from it.
Por mon chief, on the other hand, resembles the tenor of Sol sub nube in both F and W 1 , and, unlike Chanter et renvoisier sueil, retains Sol sub nube's refrain, its melisma corresponding to Sol sub nube's cauda, particularly the version recorded in W 1 , as shown in Ex. 4. 64 Sol sub nube is, then, the likelier, or at least more influential, model for Por mon chief, with its cauda, arguable chronological priority to Por mon chief, and closer resemblance to Por mon chief's melody. Several of Sol sub nube's stanzas comment didactically on the Virgin's pregnancy. The third and fifth stanzas outline the paradox of Christ's physical boundedness, given the unboundedness of his divine nature in space and time ('He who alone is eternal, and who rules all things, was made into that which he was not before, and yet he did not change' (3.1-4) . . . '[he] whom no sharpness of mind can encompass or space confine' (5.5-6)), while the final stanza outlines the soteriological implications of this paradox, anticipating Por mon chief's focus on Gautier's impending 'end': 'So we must first flee from Babylon and cling unflinchingly to our true refuge, so that our end [exitus] may be in the son of God (1.1-6).' 65 The fourth stanza, moreover, refers to the Virgin's womb as a port (portus Ah, peerless abode! Abode, I repeat, of the Lord, abode accessible to none save the Godman. O amazing matter, a port given to no one, proper, indeed, to no one, except for the virgin mother.
The use of portus-though a common word in Marian conducti-recalls the annominatio on port in Por mon chief and in the queue of Gautier's second prologue. 66 If we assume the conductus's chronological priority, the combination of this word, its surrounding stanza appearing in nine of Sol sub nube's ten sources, along with the song's incarnational theme and meditation on the Virgin's pregnancy, may have signalled the Ex. 3. Comparative transcription of Por mon chief and its contrafacta, lines 1-2 song as a fitting extension to Gautier's queue and as a base for Por mon chief's own focus on (re-)birth. 67 From the perspective of reception, the fact that Por mon chief has two contrafacta means not only that the melody is probably better known, but that the circumstances of that knowledge are more variable. The contrafacta that listeners know of a given song, and the order in which they come to know them, alter the possibilities for intertextual interpretation, shifting the lens through which that song is seen so that the inherently unstable nature of reception is made more palpable. As Daniel E. O'Sullivan has put it, the effect of such double or compound contrafaction is 'kaleidoscopic'. 68 For those who know the trouvère contrafact, Por mon chief potentially becomes a model of longing and devotion that transforms the lyric narrator's love object from my lady to Our Lady; if Por mon chief is heard first, it can function pre-emptively, staking a claim on the listener's emotional attachments that reorientates Thibaut's chanson through Gautier's Marian message: Thibaut's poet-lover's sighing and weeping ('g'en pleur et sospir et dueil' (1.7)) becomes just another example of what Gautier lambastes as the 'weeping and wailing' ('pleurs et deschans') of the trouvère's soul (I Pro II,. For those who know the conductus, Por mon chief not only makes the concept of the Incarnation more accessible: it also foregrounds ever more sharply, through melodic association, the contrast to the narrator's own, looming 'ex-carnation'. It takes the question of what it means for God to be in a body and contemplates, along with it, what it means for Gautier to be without a body, or to be in his body in an entirely different way.

WITHOUT TERM AND WITHOUT END
The final stanza and refrain of Por mon chief imagines such a body-less or re-embodied scenario by depicting the apocalypse. Here, the narrator prays to the Virgin with 'joined hands' to intercede so that he might be counted among the blessed. 69 Rather Ex. 4. Affinities between the caudae in W 1 (Sol sub nube) and M (Por mon chief) 67 The fourth stanza appears in all sources except F, which generally only includes the first and second stanzas of conducti.
68 Daniel E. O'Sullivan, 'On connait la chanson: La contrafacture des mélodies des trouvères dans le Ludus super Anticlaudianum d'Adam de la Bassée', Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 26 (2013), 109-27 at 120. 69 As Switten ('Borrowing,Citation,and Authorship',34) and Hunt (Miraculous Rhymes, 49) have observed, the clasped hands image ('a jointes mains') evokes both the monk and the trouvère. For a full list of instances in which the phrase is used, see Hunt, ibid. 49 n. 2. than returning to the usual refrain text, however, the last line of the strophe and final refrain paraphrase Matthew 25: 34, in which Christ describes the separation of the blessed from the damned at the final Judgement and the blessed's inheritance of the Kingdom (see Ex. 5). This quotation is in Latin except for two lines, which return to French: 'vos qui m'amez finement, / sans terme et sanz finement' (you who love me well without [a fixed] term and without end) (R2.2-3). This shift in language marks the third occurrence of the phrase 'sanz terme et sanz finement', its previous occurrences being in the seventh and eighth stanzas. Here, the reversion to Old French occurs precisely within the kernel of the refrain's chiastic poetic structure, so that the 'equivocal' rhyme (rime équivoque) of finement ending each of the two central lines maintains the placement of the previous refrain's equivocal rhyme (deport), both rhymes being linked together musically by a stepwise, falling-fourth motif, which will have been reinforced at this point by eight previous repetitions. With so many repetitions of the old refrain, and after so many stanzas (Chanter et renvoisier sueil has, by contrast, a conventional five stanzas and Sol sub nube seven), this last refrain subverts the listener's real or virtual participation with a new, and-in its eschatological content-expressly final, text. Such a change marks the end of the song, and, like the apocalypse, the end of measured time (that is, the end of a performance, during which the cyclical music of this song's melody lends a certain incantatory quality to time). As the song approaches its end, however, the repeated phrase 'sanz terme et sanz finement' emphasizes the non-ending of eternity. 70 The effect is not only emphatic, but also performative: repeatedly calling into being the idea of eternity provides a way of simulating, through language, an idea that cannot be temporally contained by language.
The word terme, which can refer not only to a fixed amount of time, but also to a term of pregnancy, evokes another kind of return-the refrain's continuous return to the moment of Mary's pregnancy-which suggests a link between the fixed term of a human lifetime and that of gestation. 71 Such a link reinforces the theme of rebirth: human life is reconfigured into a gestational term of formation, after which, with death, another kind of life begins. This idea is emphasized by the fact that in both manuscript sources, Por mon chief consists of nine stanzas; it is as if the song itself represented a term of gestation, or a pre-celestial, earthly term, such as Gautier's own life, a notion made more fitting when one considers that the song is made up of autobiographical textual fragments from elsewhere in the Miracles. Its nine stanzas can thus be seen as constituting a kind of a sung epitaph in which Gautier himself is 'brought to term' through performance, but which is inevitably 'without term and without end' because of its re-performability.
Por mon chief is an instance in which form performs its content: on the level of the song's refrain structure, repetition evokes the consolation of a return to God, and to life, after death, by interposing a depiction of the expectant Virgin within a series of stanzas whose text and number emphasize the passing of time. The perception of time's passing is also regulated musically by the repetition of single and grouped sonorities whose 'sameness' act as reference points. On the level of contrafacture, in sharing a melody that circulated within two different cultural milieux, Por mon chief opens itself to a wider circle of recognition among both religious and lay people ('soit clercs, soit Ex. 5. Por mon chief's ninth (final) stanza and refrain lais', in Gautier's words), and, in its reception, potentially incorporates a subtext of theological depth into Gautier's project of redirecting the pleasures of the courtly. These observations rely on a consideration of the song in time (as 'process' as well as 'product'), and thus depart from a tendency in earlier scholarship to limit the analysis of medieval strophic song to its first, notated stanza, a practice that assumes the redundancy of formal repetition-essentially a conflation (or more narrow alignment) of music with its written traces.
In the Miracles, music is clearly conceived not just as a textual object, but as a way of being in time, whose looping back to the recent and distant past, through formal repetition and contrafacture, aims to make circularity productive, leading from musicoliterary diversion to a greater devotion, and ultimately to an eschatological goal whose temporality dissolves in itself. In Por mon chief in particular, recursive song intensifies the function of Gautier's recursive poetry: if, as Alice Oswald has said, poetry works to 'lift' the reader 'into repetition', providing 'a relief from linear time', Por mon chief gives this formal insight an existential spin, depicting a relief from time's toll on the living. 72

ABSTRACT
The thirteenth-century prior and poet-musician Gautier de Coinci is known for his extravagant wordplay, which relies on the recursive patterning of verbal sound. This article considers Gautier's penchant for sonic repetition in the light of the music that frames his book of miracles, focusing on the song Por mon chief reconforter, a chanson à refrain written in the voice of an aging Gautier coming to terms with his imminent death. The song's exclusion from Frederic Koenig's standard edition of the Miracles means it has received little scholarly attention, yet its earliest source is linked with Gautier's original exemplar. The article examines how repeated musico-poetic forms-within the stanza, between stanzas, and in the more temporally extended repetition of contrafacture-interact with notions of temporality and mortality voiced in the song's texts and contexts, suggesting that such structures reshape the experience of time into one that is less linear, and therefore less final.
Trans., 1.1-8: In order to comfort my head, in order to please my heart, I want to enjoy myself a little by praising, by delighting in the one who could bear the grand king and nourish him whom neither earth could carry nor heaven comprehend or contain.
Trans., R1: My lady, you who carried all our delight for nine months, why do I delight that you carried the son of God? Trans., 1.1-8: The sun hides behind the cloud, not knowing of eclipses. When the son of the highest father blended himself with the flesh, the Word of the Father did not wish for a more exalted marriage, while flesh could not hope for a union that would bring it greater glory.
Trans., R1: Rejoice, O you new bride! It is the faith, and it is the truth that the deity was not corrupted by the flesh.
2 Solis iubar temperat, The weightless clouds temper the sun; the earth brings forth fruits by which everything becomes sweet. The newly given grace joins earth to heaven. He came to take the spoils of war from the one who was keeping us in captivity.
nubes molis nescia, terra fructum generat 4 quo dulcescunt omnia. Celo terras federat nova data gratia. Tollere qui venerat 8 captivantis spolia. R 3 Qui solus eternus est, He who alone is eternal, and who rules all things, was made into that which he was not before, and yet he did not change. Swaddling clothes tightly enclosed him who is free from all things, and the Infinite lies among animals. Absque Dei numine Without the will of God, no mind can grasp that from a virgin mother the God-man was born, whom no sharpness of mind can encompass or space confine, yet who, while being in human form, lay down, sat, and walked.
sensu nullo capitur, quod de matre virgine 4 Deus homo nascitur, qui mentis acumine qui loco non clauditur ens tamen in homine 8 iacet, sedet, graditur. R 6 Rubus non conburitur The bush is not consumed amid the fiery flames, nor does the mother lose the lily of chastity. This is not understood by any mortal, except by the one who is free from Babylon. a inter flammas ignium nec mater transgreditur 4 castitatis lilium hoc non intelligitur ab ullo mortalium, nisi a quo fugitur 8 Babilonis medium. R 7 Ab hoc ergo medio So we must first flee from Babylon and cling unflinchingly to our true refuge, so that our end may be in the son of God. May the Paraclete lead us joyfully to him! fugiendum primitus et vero refugio 4 aderendum penitus ut in Dei filio noster fiat exitus ad quem nos cum gaudio 8 perducat paraclitus. R a This appears to be a reference to Augustine's commentary on Psalm 136, in which he likens the heart of Babylon (medium Babylonis) to worldly delights. The one who is free from Babylon is thus the one who is free from worldly desires.
Trans., 1.1-8: I'm in the habit of singing and being joyful; [but] now, when I lose that which I am accustomed to loving, I must lament and weep: nothing can comfort me. My eyes were so cruel for daring to show her to me-I weep and sigh and suffer for it, that they make me love by force.
2 Bien me puis apercevoir I can well perceive that it is truly as they say: that which one has whenever one wishes, one values very little, and that which one cannot have, one holds to be such a great delight. Lovers, who have counted me amongst their number, have made me know it.
qu'il est voirs ce que l'en dit: ce qu'en a a son vouloir 4 l'en le prise mult petit, et ce qu'en ne puet avoir tient l'en a si grant delit. amors le m'ont fet savoir 8 qui m'on mis en leur escrit 3 Hé dame, de vostre ami For God's sake, my lady, may pity take hold of you concerning your friend! Do not forget him completely if he happens to be far away from you. He has cut his heart in two: one half of it is yours; he does not possess the other part, except by your leave.
pour Dieu praingne vous pitié! Nel metez mie en oubli 4 s'il est de vous esloignié. Son cuer a parmi parti: vostre en est l'uns moitié, De l'autre n'est il sesi 8 se n'est par vostre congié. 4 Douce dame, ce m'est vis, Sweet lady, as I see it, I know that I'll die for you. Your face astonished me more than a bird captured in a trap. When I look at your clear face, which I love so much from a true heart, I think I'll go mad if you don't have mercy on me.
bien sai pour vous me morrai: plus m'a sorpris vostre vis 4 qu'oisel qui est pris au broi. Quant regard vostre cler vis que tant aim de cuer verai, je cuit bien enragier vis, 8 se n'avez merci de moi. 5 En ma chançon je vous pri, Lady, in my song I beg you-no longer do I ask you-that you not put into oblivion the one who is dying for you. They are indeed enemies who go about so putting you off: God grant that they be condemned before the sun disappears.