Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (review)

Reviews 223 Parergon 20.2 (2003) Paden, William D., ed., Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (Illinois Medieval Studies), Urbana/Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000; cloth; pp. 371; RRP US$39.95; ISBN 0252025369. This book’s provisional title, Historicising Genre in Medieval Lyric, reflects the fact that it is neither an introduction to medieval lyric nor to the variety of European lyric genres. It is a collection of 14 essays mainly by North American scholars, edited by an Occitanist noted for his work on female troubadours and on the pastourelle. As in his earlier collection, The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, Paden has assembled a group of eminent specialists who adhere to a narrow brief, the result being a volume of real interest and merit, rather than a random group of essays. Not surprisingly, troubadour lyric is of central concern in about half the essays, and even opens the book ahead of Winthop Wetherbee’s essay on secular Latin lyric. However, origins and influences are of tangential interest in most of the essays, leaving us to make the connections between them. The ‘historical context’ of the title is not being reconstructed for the reader, who is assumed to possess a high degree of prior knowledge; though not, thankfully, of all the languages covered (including Occitan, Latin, Galician-Portugese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, French, Castilian and Italian), the quotes always being followed by English translations (except for some modern critics). Each essay stands alone and is followed by its own notes. There is also an index to the whole volume. Paden begins by backtracking from those who, without the aid of computer, assembled the troubadour corpus early last century, feeling it necessary to list poems by genre, even when this drove them to invent genres (such as the sirventes-canso). Raimbaut d’Aurenga’s attempt to avoid classification by insisting ‘... I don’t know what this which I am beginning is. It is not a vers, estribot, or sirventes, nor can I find a name for it...’ proved no obstacle. István Frank decided it was a sirventes, while Hill and Bergin put it in an exclusive genre of one: the ‘I-don’t-know-what-it-is’. Twentieth-century editors were building on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan attempts to codify the troubadour corpus. With the computer, Paden analyses the corpus they assembled, and his conclusions shed light on the choices each poet made. He finds the canso, sirventes and cobla together account for 80% of the poems (these being their modern, not authorial, classifications), but 224 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) the canso’s popularity declined over the 200 years to 1300, during which increasing numbers of coblas and poems in minor genres were composed. Despite accounting for one fifth of troubadour lyrics, the cobla, a one- or two-verse poem, has been the Cinderella genre. Elizabeth W. Poe explains how a word meaning the stanzas of a poem came to represent an actual short poem, while still retaining its prior meaning. Poems such as Azalais de Porcairagues’ ‘Ar em al freg temps vengut’ (which Paden’s essay re-edits to determine her ‘sense of genre’ [p.38]) had one or two stanzas lifted by a compiler whose manuscript presented them as a new cobla. Rupert T. Pickens considers that later Arts of Poetry cannot illuminate early (pre-1180) troubadour practice and proposes to replace the conventional genres with three new linguistics-based categories: pure lyric, reciprocal discourse and narrative. The inadequacy of conventional genres is also argued by Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, for whom the division of fifteenth-century Castilian cancionero lyric into sung and recited poetry creates more problems than it solves. Rather than oppose cantigas/canciones and decires, she sees them all as influenced by the rhetorical arts and by other literature. (Compare the evidence of Paden and Pickens as to what early troubadours considered a canso and what a sirventes.) She feels the fifteenth-century lyric has suffered from scholars’ expectations based on the Occitan canso and Galician-Portugese cantigas. Regarding the latter, Julian Weiss considers the male-voiced cantigas...