Gautier de Coinci shaped his great Marian collection, the Miracles de Nostre Dame, as one long storytelling session, and like all good storytellers he incorporated personally meaningful allusions to engage his audience and stimulate a lively response. His listeners and readers were many – highborn men and women, lay and clerical, all friends – but foremost among them were his neighbors, the nuns of Notre Dame de Soissons. He dedicated his work to them at the heart of his collection within two monumental poems, the ‘Miracle of the Chaste Empress’ and its commentary, Gautier's sermon on chastity, La Chasteé as nonains, which he composed not long after the resolution of the scandalous marital struggles of the king and queen of France, Philip II Augustus and Ingeborg of Denmark. Since the nuns had harbored Ingeborg in their monastery when the royal marriage crisis was most acute, Gautier evoked the two chaste, repudiated queens – the Empress of Rome and Ingeborg – as exemplar and counter-example, and staged the nuns’ response to their stories in a song that he inserted at the end of his sermon. It celebrates sacred vows, marital and monastic, and passes judgment on he who disdained them: Philip Augustus. The sequence of story and commentary, with its interpolated nuns’ song, together form a skilled storyteller's book-bound performance complete with simulated audience response.

The nuns’ song, La Fontenele i sort clere, is lively and lopsided, and has puzzled scholars for nearly a century because its extensive formal irregularities are so uncharacteristic of a master lyricist like Gautier. Gérard Gros, however, sees the irregularities as purposefully designed to represent the novices’ amateur lyrical response to Gautier's sermon-commentary on the empress miracle: ‘Le lecteur a sous les yeux une chanson non pas disloquée, mais peu à peu s’articulant autour de la défense et illustration du mariage mystique. Anticipant sa mise en oeuvre alors qu’il rime son sermon, l’auteur feint l’improvisation.’ The present essay examines how the song's eccentricities – its formal irregularities and patchwork of themes – not only lend it a playful and impromptu air, but also make Gautier's historical commentary appear to flow naturally from the mouths of the young nuns. The song is at once a playful answer to the mal mariée that recalls the repudiated queens’ dismal marriages, a disjoint parody of the satirical chanson de nonne and a wedding celebration for novices.

The storyteller on the cover of this book stands on the margin, both inside and outside the story. Will he momentarily step into the hall to begin his entertainment at the feast going on inside? Or will he turn his eyes our way instead and launch into the Arthurian romance that has already begun within the frame to his right? Either way, his vielle is raised to play an overture whose melodies have grown so faint that we can now only imagine them. His eyes are trained on the courtly revelry beside him, as are the eyes of the kneeling page and the bishop peering up from below. For this brief moment and forever, these figures all ignore the readers – kings and ladies, monks and nuns, historians, scholars and critics – who watch and listen for the story to begin.

Reading the words on a manuscript page like this one is like watching a performance unfold. The elegant script twines across the page, carrying voices and backstories as dramatic as the message Tristan inscribed on the hazel branch for Iseut. The page is framed by vines among whose colorful leaves animals carry out their impertinent ruses. The reader warms to the drama by the light reflected in the miniatures’ burnished gold, just as the child Marcel warmed to his mother's voice as she read bedtime stories in Proust's exploration of memories both personal and medieval. There is no denying the enchantment.

Before the Gutenberg era, storytelling met critical and dynamic social needs related to governance and war, communication and education, faith and artistic creation, as well as a thousand gradations of entertainment to elicit everything from awe to raucous laughter among people of every age and station. Many feared that storytelling had died when it entered print, but Boccaccio is proof that it thrived in the new medium. As we pass into a world beyond Gutenberg, stories are told in tweets of 140 silent characters, and they stream on the internet, traveling great distances to vast audiences of solitary individuals, their responses illuminated by smartphones and tablets. Humanistic investigation into storytelling has likewise taken a web-based turn, as manuscript libraries the world over make their holdings available in high-quality digitizations, free and open to all on the internet.