Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut by Judith A. Peraino (review)

Judith A. Peraino’s new book Giving Voice to Love sets out to find traces of subjectivity and self-expression in the formulaic world of medieval love song. Based on studies of a plethora of monophonic songs from a range of Occitan and Old French genres, Peraino contends that expressivity is created through deviation from musico-poetic convention as well as through the foregrounding of multi-voiced subjectivities in written, read, and sung performance. Maintaining that ‘the greatest significance of the monophony of secular love songs . . .may be its symbolic function—the representation of autonomous self-expression, of the individual voices of the troubadours and trouvères’ (p. 28), Peraino is adamant that this ‘voice is always already voices’ (p. 29).

The book’s introductory chapter discusses theories of medieval subjectivity by Sarah Kay, Gerald A. Bond, and Peter Haidu, and before this backdrop Peraino establishes her basic understanding of the concept: ‘self is not identical to the subject, but subjectivity is identical to self-awareness’ (p. 21; original emphasis). Intended as a departure from scholars’ previous understanding of expressivity in medieval love song, the chapter also provides a brief outline of the repertory’s twentieth-century reception history. Peraino distances herself in particular from the formalist approaches of the 1960s and 1970s undertaken by scholars such as Paul Zumthor and Roger Dragonetti (Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972); Roger Dragonetti, La Technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise (Bruges, 1960)), which denied ‘any trace of subjectivity in the lyrics’ (p. 14). Likewise, she goes beyond more recent work that reinstates the subject in medieval lyrics through close readings and notions of authorship, and proposes a musically affirmed plurality of songs’ subjects, elaborating ‘the sprawling nature of their subjective voices, and their density of selves that is a direct function of their music’ (p. 30).

Chapter 1, ‘The Turn of the Voice’, assesses musical forms of return as the vehicle for self-expression. A discussion of Macabru’s Ad un estrun, which sees the lyric voice embodying not only the poet’s voice but also the lord’s, leads Peraino to appropriate Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation: the tornadas attached to many songs return to the mid-point of the stanzas, and it is in this musical return that subjectivity is expressed and the subject is ‘interpellated’. Its new music allows the tornada’s text, often featuring real-world names and places, to be emphasized, and draws attention to the performer. Some songs repeat earlier passages of text in their tornada, a subgenre termed the ‘tornada-reprise’ by Peraino. The tornada’s trouvère equivalent, the envoi, has a similarly expressive function. Discussing a number of Thibaut de Champagne’s envois, Peraino proposes that their use of public or commonplace statements in this space, otherwise designated for self-expression, allows public and private subjectivities to merge.

With only thirteen songs surviving with music (four in Occitan, nine in Old French), the descort has a relatively small musical presence in manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère art. Twelve of these thirteen heterostrophic songs survive in trouvère M (Paris, Bibliothè que nationale de France [hereafter BnF], fr. 844; many manuscripts of medieval song are now available online; trouvère M can be found at<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84192440>). Peraino discusses this manuscript’s three additions of Occitan descorts in her second chapter, ‘Delinquent Descorts and Medieval Lateness’. Aiming to uncover modes of self-expression in genre choice, she presents the descort as an anti-canso with a purposefully uneasy fit between text and music. All three of these descorts, she argues, challenge musical expectations, such as the common notion of modal rhythm’s exalted status: ‘with these descorts, the rhythmof the ars antiqua is made to sound excessive and...