Description
Book SynopsisStolen 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 historya 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 ques
Trade Review
Demonstrat[ing] a solid knowledge of her corpus and of the narratives she discusses... Eliza Zingesser offers readers a new way of reading Old French literature, looking at the adoption and conversion of materials to new purposes. She makes a strong case that medieval French authors subsumed Occitan.
* SPECULUM *
Zingesser approaches her carefully designed corpus through a persuasive combination of historical apprehension, manuscript expertise, close reading, and theory. She skillfully guides her readers through a vast amount of data with a clear, always elegant style.
* H-France *
Stolen Song is a testament to Zingesser's incisive powers of analysis.
* Digital Philology *
Thanks to Eliza Zingesser's carefully argued and painstakingly documented study, specialists of Old French and Old Occitan song may now better understand how Francophone authors and audiences sought to subsume Occitan literary prestige into their own cultural traditions.
* Tenso *
Stolen Song offers a welcome, fresh perspective on a medieval past. Zingesser's arguments are convincingly parsed out with great care and are solidly founded by primary source study alongside forerunning secondary scholarship, especially that of Sarah Kay—an obviously significant influence.
* Comitatus *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
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
