Adam de la Halle’s Monophonic Songs Revisited: The Reference to Dedalus in "Helas! Il n’est mais nus qui aint"

Abstract

This thesis shows that Adam de la Halle’s monophonic songs have unjustly been overlooked in musicological scholarship so far and should be (re)considered in the context of the late-medieval French song tradition. In demonstrating this, Adam’s monophonic song “Helas! Il n’est mais nus qui aint” is presented as a case study. Although this late thirteenth-century song refers to the myth of Dedalus, musicologists have focused exclusively on how this myth is referred to in four late fourteenth-century ballades and have never taken Adam’s song into account. Yet, my analysis of the text-music relationships in “Helas! Il n’est mais nus qui aint” shows that the reference to Dedalus and Icarus shapes this entire song and effectively contributes to the understanding of Adam’s authorial persona as a particularly well-educated cleric-trouvère, and of how Adam's contemporaries and successors perceived his oeuvre.