Trovatore amante spia: Otto secoli di cronache intorno al celebre favorito che salvò Re Riccardo by Davide Daolmi (review)

In recent years, scholars gravitating around the field of medievalism have produced a wealth of publications dedicated to the conflict between two seemingly distinct Middle Ages. On the one hand, the '''found'' Middle Ages'—as they have recently been defined by Louise D'Arcens —are studied and interpreted through the material objects of the medieval past that have survived until our time ('Introduction: Medievalism, Scope and Complexity', in Louise D'Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge, 2016), 1–13). On the other, the '''made'' Middle Ages' are centred on artefacts, rituals, and performances that originated after the Middle Ages themselves, and whose overall effect is to express 'ideas of the ''medieval'' as a conceptual rather than a historical category'. However, the solidity of this dichotomy has long been questioned, in music studies as elsewhere. As the work of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Haines has already demonstrated, because of the necessarily limited extent of the available evidence, to write about the protagonists and the performance-related aspects of medieval music—and, perhaps, of any music—is always more about creative reconstruction than establishing historical truth (Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge, 2002), John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2005)). In his book Trovatore amante spia, Davide Daolmi takes this line of thought a step further. Not only is invention inevitable, he claims, but any attempt to live without it means to give up on our collective memory of the past. 'We have been forced to choose between the Middle Ages and fantasy—even more so in a milieu in which research is very specialized and fiction is often naïf. The result [is] that we schizophrenically detest one to love the other, depending on one's own [choice]. And the cut of that umbilical cord that used to connect us to yesterday has killed our memory' (p. 196).

Daolmi builds his argument on an example 'stubbornly chased' over eight centuries—along with several other cases stemming from the leading narrative discourse, including that of the Chastelain de Couci, a trouvère to whom a full chapter is devoted (pp. 115–55). His primary example is Blondel de Nesle, a legendary trouvère whose biography and musical production have been the subject of dedicated dictionary articles and critical editions, many of them omitting the crucial detail that Blondel never existed. 'We have invented him little by little along the centuries, perhaps as a pastime or out of boredom, until all of us, including the most erudite scholars, have forgotten that it was just a joke' (back cover). Daolmi reconstructs this story from its earliest source, a manuscript from c.1260 available in a dozen existing testimonies compiled over three hundred years, the most ancient of which is currently held by the British Library (Add. 11753). That source, a French récit attributed to an anonymous 'Minstrel of Reims', tells the story of the rescue of Richard I, the Lionheart, by his trusty minstrel Blondel ('Blondiaus' in the sources). The king, who had been imprisoned in 1193 by Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI on his way back from the Third Crusade, was finally found by Blondel after he heard Richard singing from his prison tower a chanson that the two had composed together.

This anecdote is no more than a fictional addition to the historical episode of the capture and subsequent ransom of King Richard, which could only be paid by confiscating from the clergy and laymen of England a good share of the value of their property—the result of this was 'widespread discontent' and later, the popular success of another myth, that of Robin Hood (p. 23). In the following centuries, however, this story, along with the name of Blondel, would enjoy a long-lasting popularity. First, two sources...