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Reviews 245 funeral speech (cf. John M . McManamon, Funeral oratory and the cultural ideals ofItalian humanism, Chapel Hill and London, 1989), the emphasis upon citizen mditias (nos 17-20), the interest in rhetorical debate (see. nos. 17-23), and the tendency to cite historical example in support of arguments (see no. 8 p. 40, and no. 17 p. 61). John O.Ward History Department Sydney University Van Vleck, Amelia E., Memory and re-creation in troubadour lyric, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of Catifornia Press, 1991; Cloth; pp. x, 283; 12figures,5 tables; R.R.P. US$38.00. Dr Van Vleck's book is the latest of recent studies of troubadour poetry and in some respects the most significant because she has investigated the processes of poetic creation, transmission, performance and transformation. The essential question is how and why could highly individualistic poets such as the troubadours allow their songs to be changed by the performers, scribes, and compilers of manuscript anthologies who transmitted the poetry? The 'open' or 'moving'textwas the norm, despite the efforts of some poets to 'close' or 'fix' it. The poem, a message sent to an audience of one or more, sometimes contains an invitation to modify its content, perhaps as a sign of its reception. Concentrating on the generation of 1170, from which she has selected twentythree poets, the author has thus examined the self-conscious artistry and the ambivalent attitude of these poets to the concept of thefixedtext. The book is divided into three parts, thefirstof which deals with three sets of direct evidence: the vocabulary of love and song, writing and memory, and song sheets and song books. If love and the creation of poetry are equivalent, the vocabulary of love must also convey the poet's artistic intent as is best illustrated by Bernart Marti's use of the expressions entrebescar los motz, entrebescar la lengua. It is not, however, love which is under scrutiny here, but what the troubadourstellus through the love poetry about their words and then medium, which, essentially oral and aural, entails, not writing and books, but singing, memorization, transmission and improvement through new performances. Van Vleck has convincingly disputed both Grober's theory of individual song sheets and the notions of an authorized collection and literary property. The circumstantial evidence of firstly the manuscripts and secondly the rhymes and order or sequence of the poems is presented in Part Two. Mouvance, the result of many years' transmission with improvement along the way, functioned selectively. In search of the principles determining this selectivity, Van Vleck has examined closely the changes in stanzaic sequence attested in the 246 Reviews manuscripts finding that stanza length and stanza linkage are the two most important factors for stabdity. This chapter depends on very detailed statistical analysis, the results of which are given in thefiguresand tables of Appendix A. Study of individual poems in each type of rhyme scheme further shows that while the rhyme scheme could inhibit change, it might not necessarily do so. The multiple reading of Bernart de Ventadorn's 'Non es meravelha s'eu chan' (pp. 110-17) reveals the extent to which stanza sequence is essential to the meaning of a performance, or version, of a poem, its variation creating new thematic combinations. In Part Three Van Vleck examines the testimony of the poets, their debates on style around 1170, particularly the controversy about the trobar clus and 'natural' poetics. She has gone beyond the argument between Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Bornelh to probe the metaphors and images, for example that of the closed garden used by Marcabru and Piere d'Alvernhe (pp. 152-55), as a metaphor for 'closed' poetry. Distinction is thus made between two concepts of the lyric text: an 'open' text, subject to transposition and improvement, movable at the whim of successive transmitters, and a 'closed' text which is recognized as the work of a single creator who shares its meaning with a select discerning audience (p. 163). Thefinalchapter is devoted to the metaphorical vocabulary of mouvance and textual integrity, that is the invitation to alter and improve the song, to the metaphors relating to rust, gold, metalwork, the workplace...

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