Publication – Eliza Zingesser, « Stolen Song. How the Troubadours Became French »

Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs.

Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the « Frenchness » of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history.

Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

Eliza Zingesser is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.

Table des matières :

Introduction
1. Of Birds and Madmen: Occitan Songs in French Songbooks
2. Keeping Up with the French: Jean Renart’s Francophile Empire in the Roman de la rose
3. Birdsong and the Edges of the Empire: Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la violette
4. From Beak to Quill: Troubadour Lyric in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour
5. The Rustic Troubadours: Occitanizing Lyrics in France
Epilogue

Informations pratiques :

Eliza Zingesser, Stolen Song. How the Troubadours Became French, Cornell University Press, 2020. 258 p., 34 ill. ISBN13: 9781501747571. Prix : 35,95 $.

Source : Cornell University Press