The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance by Gregory B. Stone (review)

REVIEWS unable to find a lacuna that would have made a difference in her argument. This is a book to purchase, for it will not be superseded for some time. THOMAS J. HEFFERNAN University of Tennessee GREGORY B. STONE. The Death ofthe Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resis­ tance to the Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. 229. $32.95. The intriguing thesis of The Death of the Troubadour holds that certain literary texts in the late Middle Ages had a presentiment of the Renais­ sance and hated what they saw. They viewed Burckhardt's new individual, subjective self, the private, self-determining, unique, autonomous ego "as a loss, as the destruction of a philosophy of anonymity that had been one of the great gains of medieval thinking" (p. 3). Rather than contradicting Robert Hanning's The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (1977), Stone tries instead to look forward from the Middle Ages rather than backward from the Renaissance. This hypothesis offers the attractive prospect ofjoin­ ing our historical moment with the Middle Ages and seeing the Renais­ sance as a finite historical epoch now ended. As we confront a revolution in information technology as profound as Gutenberg's, we too may look back nostalgically at what will be lost. Stone blends philology with semiology and subjectivity to uncover the communal ego in troubadour lyrics. The troubadour is the subject as an effect of language, "one who comes into being only in and through lan­ guage," not a subject who exists before and outside of language and then uses language to express that existence. The troubadour represents "song as the origin of the subject rather than the subject as the origin of song" (p. 9). Given the centrality of these issues, it is unfortunate that Stone never refers to the recent lxxly of work on medieval subjectivity, including Mi­ chel Zink's La subjectiviti littiraire au moyen age (1985), Sarah Kay's Subjec­ tivity in Troubadour Poetry (1990), Rouben Cholakian's The Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading (1990), and, in Chaucer studies, H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.'s, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canter263 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER bury Tales (1990) and Lee Patterson's Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991). Zink finds a similar shift in subjectivity between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Stone's first two chapters establish the poetic grammar of troubadour song as Saussurian langue, in opposition to the parole of poetic practice. Song can never be mastered by any individual troubadour or become the property of any individual subject because it is always already social and conventional rather than individual, novel, and localized. Neither the lover nor his lady can be individual or unique, since they exist only within the generalized langue of the love lyric. As Gace Brule says, "Everyone says that he loves thus, therefore one can't tell who is the true lover" (p. 21). The poet's lyric language is his own worst enemy; it thwarts his desire to distin­ guish himselffrom his rivals because it is equally available to them, and his claims are necessarily identical with theirs. In chapter 3, Stone argues that the love lyric not only thwarts desire but is a speculum which creates it. In the thirteenth-century Lai d'Aristotle, the philosopher desires the woman only after hearing her sing someone else's desire in a song within her song. Chapter 4 is a brilliant analysis of two late-medieval tales, the Lai � l'oiselet and Le vilain et l'oiselet. The first represents the eternal present of song as langue; the second introduces the historicization of song and the opposition between song and story. Together they narrate conflict between the troubadour past and the new bourgeois individual. The disappearance of the "little bird" suggests that courtly song has no place in the new economic and ideological order. Rather than being captured by song and drawn into desire, the burgher buys the garden and captures the bird to get the gem he believes is concealed inside. The bird tricks the burgher by offering him secret knowledge; but there is no special individual meaning beyond the common proverbial knowledge that...