Gröber Revisited: Bayesian Phylogenetics of the Troubadours' chansonniers

Overview & Synopsis

The medieval songwriters originating from Southern France, known as the troubadours, have left us a large textual heritage of more than 2 500 surviving poems, at the root of the conceptions of love and lyrical poetry that have prevailed for most of Western modern culture. Yet, in contrary to what was achieved for their northern followers (the trouvères), reaching a consensus of the transmission history of troubadour texts has proven elusive since the 19th century. In 1877, Gröber offered the first attempt at such an history, providing us with an evolutionary tree (stemma) of the compilations containing their texts (the chansonniers). For this, Gröber used the presence or absence of individual texts as a proxy to infer manuscript relationships and successive compilation events. His results have formed the basis of subsequent discussions on the transmission of troubadours' texts and manuscripts. We offer here to reproduce Gröber's approach, but using the resources provided by Bayesian phylogenetics, a framework borrowed from evolutionary biology. We use it to draw a rough sketch of the evolutionary history of troubadour lyric. We present our choices of priors and discuss early results, obtained on a subset of the c. 70 witnesses that are still extent.