Abstract
Medieval europe holds a special place in the history of song. With the emergence of the troubadours in twelfth-century Occitania, there began a tradition of vernacular song that still resonates today. Yet those early repertories are permeated with ambiguity and self-consciousness about the very medium of creation and communication: chan. Chan and chantar lie at the heart of vernacular lyric inspiration, as pretext for creative production, as the consequence and prompt of love, and as the invisible agent of communication between the protagonist and dedicatee of a song. What, though, did these categories signify? The objects that were identified, and that self-identified, as song represented a broad, frequently contradictory set of creative scenarios. As the troubadour’s influence took root in other linguistic and geographical contexts, so did the category chan/ canso / chanson/ cantiga / minnesang become a commonplace. Across traditions, songmakers described verbal creations that were void of a melodic line as chant, while within the textures of notated trouvère songs moments of reported communication were often cast as dit (speech). German repertories of voiced poetry placed unambiguous priority on song’s expressive function, conjoining the singing act with courtly aspiration in the term minnesang. Later in Italy, Dante, author of one of the first formal histories of song, unfolded his Divina Commedia song by song (canto by canto), but without evidence of a pitched line. Meanwhile, as song took to the page in manuscript anthologies, song’s material life, as a thing to be written or notated (notée), added to this already diverse lexicon.