(Lat., from farcire: ‘to stuff’).
An insertion into set texts, especially liturgical texts, of phrases or words not originally part of those texts. It would appear that the term is virtually synonymous with trope (see Trope (i)); this is shown by a text quoted by Du Cange (‘Qualiter debeant cantare Kyrie eleyson cum Farsa’), but as a rule the term ‘trope’ was used for interpolations into the Mass and Office chants, while ‘farsa’ was used for interpolations into the lessons, even though farses were usually copied within the trope and versus collections such as F-Pn 1139 and E-Mn 288. The terminological distinction is found also in sources that merely refer to the practice, such as ordinals and ceremonials. Farsing seems to have been largely a French tradition that spread to Spain and Norman Sicily and its sources range from the 12th to the 15th century, with the majority falling in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Unlike tropes, which were almost universally written in Latin, a certain number of lesson farses, particularly for the Epistles, were in French, but farses should be distinguished from macaronic verse or from the simple alternation of stanzas in different languages. Their function, like that of the tropes, was to elucidate and comment upon the liturgical text. A farsed antiphon of the Virgin with interpolations in French is shown in ex.1.
The most widespread examples of farse come from the 12th and 13th centuries and were especially applied to the Epistle of the major feasts of the Christmas cycle: Christmas, St Stephen’s Day (26 December), St John the Evangelist (27 December), the Holy Innocents (28 December), St Thomas of Canterbury (29 December), the Circumcision (1 January) and the Epiphany (6 January); Easter, Pentecost, feasts of the Blessed Virgin, and St Nicholas also received farsed epistles. Epistles farsed in Latin appear to have preceded any of the French farsings. (See Dreve, Blume and Bannister for farsed epistles in Latin for a wide variety of feasts.) The farses could be in verse with assonance or in prose; a fair number of them survive with melodies, some of which can be quite elaborate (Stäblein; Arlt).
MGG1 (‘Epistel’; B. Stäblein)
C. du Fresne: Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis (Paris, 1678), rev. 1882–7 by L. Favre)
E. Martène, ed.: De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus libri (Antwerp, 2/1736–8/R), i, 281E–282; iii, 99–100, 108E
A.E. Poquet, ed.: Rituale seu mandatum insignis ecclesiae suessionensis (Soissons, 1856)
C. Cuissard: ‘Une épitre farcie pour l’Epiphanie’, Bulletin de la Société dunoise, v (1885), 224
L. Gautier: Histoire de la poésie liturgique au Moyen-Age, i: Les tropes (Paris, 1886/R), 151–2
U. Chevalier, ed.: Prosolarium ecclesiae aniciensis: office en vers de la Circoncision en usage dans l’église du Puy (Paris, 1894)
G.M. Dreves, C. Blume and H.M. Bannister, eds.: ‘Analecta hymnica medii aevi’, xlix (Leipzig, 1906/R)
H. Villetard: Office de Pierre de Corbeil (Office de la Circoncision) improprement appelé ‘Office des fous’: texte et chant publiés d’après le manuscrit de Sens (XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1907)
W. Arlt: Ein Festoffizium des Mittelalters aus Beauvais in seiner liturgischen und musikalischen Bedeutung (Cologne, 1970), i, 93; ii, 105, 241, 302
MICHEL HUGLO/ALEJANDRO E. PLANCHART