Rethinking the chansons de toile : critical evaluation and editions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The genre appellation “chansons de toile” generally refers to approximately twenty poems written in Old French during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. They are short narrative lyrics which describe the romantic struggles of young women, usually pining for an absent lover or dealing with an unhappy marriage or betrothal. The genre’s name refers to toile, a type of fabric, as usually the heroines are occupied with weaving as they lament. While it is a contemporary descriptor, the genre is mostly a twentieth-century construction; however, it is remarkable to find a substantial number of poems which share so many thematic and structural elements composed over such a short period of time. The attention given these songs is largely dedicated to the centrality of women, particularly their desires and their active role in solving their plights. This, coupled with the archaic flavor of the verse (structurally as well as thematically), has historically inspired scholars to attribute these songs to actual women, or at least to claim that they are strongly and perceivably influenced by women’s songs, particularly working women’s song. However, despite the best efforts of twentieth-century scholarship, the idea that these represent “genuine” women’s song or folk song has been demonstrated as tenuous at best and fanciful at worst. The patina of court culture is indelible, and the few which are attributed to composers are attributed to literary men. This, however, presents a new problem: why then were these imitation women’s songs written? Analyzing the pastiche of archaic and courtly elements contained in these poems, particularly the anachronistic agency of their female protagonists and their close association with the chansons de geste, I argue that these poems demonstrate a nostalgia for a semi-mythic lyric past with egalitarian gender relations and happy endings. Additionally, I examine the equivalencies made between women, the past, and the folk, arguing that many of the problematic conflations made by the Romantics have a thirteenth-century precursor in the chansons de toile.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".