About

Ardis Butterfield is the Marie Borroff Professor of English at Yale University, with courtesy appointments in the departments of French and Music. She specializes in the literatures and music of France and England from the 13th to 15th centuries. Born in Pakistan and educated in South India and England, she earned her BA and PhD degrees at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her scholarly work is grounded in continental and insular vernacular manuscripts, focusing on how writers and composers recorded their work and thought through social, material, and theoretical lenses. Her research interests include the medieval lyric and lyric theory, the relationship between words and music, Chaucer and nationhood, city writing, bilingualism, translation, and medieval and modern linguistic identities. She has authored notable books such as 'Poetry and Music in Medieval France' (2002) and 'The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and the Nation in the Hundred Years War' (2009), which received the 2010 Society for French Studies R.H. Gapper Prize and was designated a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Butterfield has edited several collections of essays and published around 60 articles and essays. She has held visiting appointments at institutions including the University of Virginia, the Huntington Library, and All Souls College, Oxford, and has been a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of Cambridge. She served as President of the New Chaucer Society from 2016 to 2018 and is co-founder and co-editor of the Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture series. Currently, she is working on a new Norton edition of medieval English lyrics and a book on medieval song titled 'Medieval Songlines: Theory of Medieval Song.' Her work involves rethinking approaches to medieval lyric, considering rhythm, repetition, silence, and the influence of history on voice formation in multilingual song genres. She is also involved in giving lectures and engaging in scholarly activities related to medieval literature and music.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• History
• Law
• Classics
• Media studies
• Philosophy
• Archaeology
• Literature
• Art
• Ancient history
• Epistemology
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Bibliography

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023

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  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

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• Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  This collection makes a new, profound and far-reaching intervention into the rich yet little-explored terrain between Latin scholastic theory and vernacular literature. Written by a multidisciplinary team of leading international authors, the chapters honour and advance Alastair Minnis's field-defining scholarship. A wealth of expert essays refract the nuances of theory through the medium of authoritative Latin and vernacular medieval texts, providing fresh interpretative treatment to known canonical works while also bringing unknown materials to light.

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• Preface and Acknowledgements

  2023-04-20

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• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-04-20

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• English, French and Anglo-French

  2023-05-10

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  This chapter concerns the place of Anglo-French fabliaux in the definition of Frenchness. It explores this not directly with the corpus of Anglo-French fabliaux per se, but with a small group of works in which questions of Frenchness and Englishness are central to the plot. The chapter focuses on three texts, “Des Deus Anglois et de l'Anel”, “La Male Honte” and “Le Roi d'Angleterre et le jongleur d'Ely”, that range in date from the twelfth or thirteenth century to the early fourteenth century. The cultural landscape in “Des Deus Anglois et de l'Anel” has some features that are more prominent than others. “La Male Honte” has a quite different relation to its cultural setting from “Des Deus Anglois”. Whereas “Des Deus Anglois” is plainly a story about the Englishman abroad, the action of “La Male Honte” is based firmly in England, though the endings offered by the six surviving manuscripts vary the final focus somewhat confusingly.

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• Chapter 1. Lyric Editing

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2022-07-29

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• Troubadours and Trouvères

  2021-04-18

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  In the 12th and 13th centuries, the troubadours in Occitania and the trouvères in northern France composed songs with texts in the vernacular and monophonic melodies. For the troubadours, the vernacular was Old Occitan; for their northern counterparts, Old French. This difference in idiom is sometimes held to mark a distinction between two separate but analogous traditions of medieval song. The medieval practices of compiling multilingual lyric anthologies and of borrowing melodies seem instead to affirm the contiguity of song culture across different languages. The term “lyric” during this period typically designates a text set to melody, but not all manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère lyric preserve song melodies. Music survives for nearly half of the trouvère repertory (about three thousand songs) but only about 10 percent of the twenty-six hundred extant troubadour songs. The compositional period for troubadours and trouvères is conventionally defined rather rigidly as 1100–1300, and the songs themselves as strophic and monophonic. However, the troubadours and trouvères also composed in non-strophic genres (lais and descorts), and the trouvères composed in non-musical lyric genres (congés, dits) as well as in polyphonic forms. Adam de la Halle and Jehan de Lescurel, for example, produced small but significant collections of single-text polyphonic pieces. Of course, the composition of French and Occitan song also continued beyond 1300, albeit in different social and cultural contexts, by which point the long history of its study and reception had already begun. Some of the most important reference works, such as the Pillet-Carstens Bibliographie, date from the early 20th century and come from France and Germany, while Anglophone publications on troubadour and trouvère music only began to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. Modern scholars continually renew this material by bringing it into conversation with critical theory (Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut, cited under General Studies), feminist theory (Songs of the Women Trouvères, cited under Anthologies), and social history (The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300, cited under Musical, Literary, Social, and Political Studies; The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c.1300 and Parler d’amour au puy d’Arras: Lyrique en jeu, both cited under Regional Studies). The vibrancy in troubadour and trouvère scholarship also comes from interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange among musicologists, historians, paleographers, and literary scholars. Despite their shared primary sources, the fields of musicology and of literary studies have approached troubadour and trouvère material differently, and with different emphases. In part, these differences can be ascribed to the difficulty of defining a corpus of study, which does not always overlap for the two fields. The organization of this article echoes some of these tensions between older but fundamental reference works and newer directions of inquiry, and the sometimes separate, sometimes unified, treatment of troubadour and trouvère song.

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• <i>Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Later Middle Ages</i> by Seeta Chaganti

  Common Knowledge · 2021-01-01

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  Book Review| January 01 2021 Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Later Middle Ages by Seeta Chaganti Chaganti, Seeta, Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 304 pp. Ardis Butterfield Ardis Butterfield Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2021) 27 (1): 117–118. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8723225 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ardis Butterfield; Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Later Middle Ages by Seeta Chaganti. Common Knowledge 1 January 2021; 27 (1): 117–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8723225 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 Duke University Press2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: LITTLE REVIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Response:Consent, Entente, Pite, Slider

  2021-06-30

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• Response: Consent, Entente, Pite, Slider

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2021-10-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Nicolette Zeeman

  26 shared

• Jean Michel Massing

  25 shared

• Michael Calabrese

  25 shared

• L.D. Smith

  Ultrasonic Technologies (United States)

  25 shared

• James N. Burrow

  Royal Darwin Hospital

  25 shared

• John Schiff

  California State University Los Angeles

  25 shared

• Green Knight

  California State University Los Angeles

  25 shared

• Daniel R. Davies

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Two Leverhulme Research Fellowships (2003-04, 2008-11)
• Society for French Studies R.H. Gapper Prize (2010)
• Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2010)
• Presented to the Académie Française (2010)