Songbook
How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe
Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received – a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies.
The only comparative study of its kind, "Songbook" treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category "poetry": that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks – in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists – contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook's role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.
About the Author
Marisa Galvez is associate professor of French and Italian and chair of undergraduate studies in French at Stanford University. She is the author of "Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe", also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"A landmark of material philology, 'Songbook' presents a vibrantly imaginative voice in medieval studies. Marisa Galvez breaks new ground with this sophisticated analysis of the troubadour chansonnier as an emergent genre of medieval literature. Besides opening new perspectives on the chansonnier as a performative mode, 'Songbook' is the first work to consider the theoretical implications of the poetic codex in relation to medieval lyric poetry generally. It concludes with a fascinating look at how transmission practices influenced the modern reception of medieval lyric and vice versa" – Stephen G. Nichols, Johns Hopkins University
"Numerous works exist on the songbooks of individual vernacular cultures, but none has the comparative range of Marisa Galvez's 'Songbook'. This book is groundbreaking, erudite, elegant, and sophisticated, and it will be of major importance to medieval and Renaissance scholars of lyric poetry" – Sarah Kay, New York University
"A brilliant and comprehensive book. Galvez's approach is essentially dynamic: she sees medieval songbooks not as a frozen deposit of lyrics, but as a poetic experience, actually as the very process, that generated the idea of the poetry and the image of the poet we still live with" – Michel Zink, College de France and Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
