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Reviewed by:
  • Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French by Eliza Zingesser
  • Daniel E. O’Sullivan
Zingesser, Eliza. Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French. Ithaca / London: Cornell University Press, 2020. xviii + 238 pp. Tables, figures, musical examples. ISBN: 978-1-5017-4757-1 (cloth). $34.95

The troubadours initiated an aesthetic movement beginning in the twelfth century that extended well into the thirteenth century and beyond the borders of Occitania. The reception of their works, however, was not uniform across Europe. Thanks to Eliza Zingesser’s carefully argued and painstakingly documented study, specialists of Old French and Old Occitan song may now better understand how Francophone authors and audiences sought to subsume Occitan literary prestige into their own cultural traditions. This reviewer is wary of anachronistic applications of modern critical discourse to medieval contexts, but I have to agree with Zingesser’s assertion that this dynamic constitutes “cultural appropriation.” Whereas Catalan-speaking aficionados tried to teach their audiences to appreciate troubadour lyric through poetic treatises, and Italian-speaking patrons endeavored to make troubadours more approachable through vidas and razos, Francophone elites attempted to subsume the Occitan literary world into their own aesthetics.

Zingesser’s approach combines material and traditional philology as well as literary history, codicology, and close readings. Her analysis always starts with and returns to the manuscripts themselves, and she carefully checks the work of past scholars against her own archival research, either confirming or challenging those earlier conclusions. Scholars might disagree with some of these reinterpretations, such as her assertion that the songbook section of Paris, BnF f.fr. 795 might, in fact, be of Italian origin, since the songbook might have been taken as a whole to Italy, where the first leaves would have received their treatment. Perhaps, but this is an assertion that is impossible to back up, and according to Ockham’s razor, the simplest explanation is often the best. Therefore, this reviewer still agrees with István Frank, who demonstrated that the scribes who worked on the songbook were likely from Lorraine (Frank 63; O’Sullivan 39–40). [End Page 143]

The introduction and the first chapter go hand in hand, in that they lay out some of the overarching techniques that French authors, patrons, and scribes used to claim troubadour song as their own. Importantly, while Catalan and Italian authors tried to retain or enhance the identity of individual troubadours, troubadour songs in French sources are often stripped of attribution. Furthermore, through a study of mise en page, Zingesser observes how the lack of material boundary between Occitan and French songs helps blend the two traditions together on the page. Another important technique involves what has been termed “Gallicization,” according to which the Occitan forms used by troubadours become Gallicized, i.e., made to look and sound French. The role of sonics is of prime importance, because often these songs were not translated but rather rendered into forms that sounded French while approximating the original Occitan words. One might say they were acoustically translated or transposed. As a result, marginally or entirely indecipherable passages might be produced, but Zingesser’s point is not that these scribes or readers didn’t understand the original texts. She contends that French writers and audiences sought to create songs sounding both French and Occitan; with this blurring accomplished, it was easier to claim they both originated from the same cultural tradition. In this way, Occitan songs were often identified with bird, i.e., non-human, voices, their songs perhaps pretty but not always understandable.

With the methodological and theoretical groundwork laid, in chapters 2, 3, and 4, Zingesser turns to three discrete French works that incorporate troubadour songs into their diverse literary projects. In chapter 2, she considers the incorporation of Occitan lyrics into Jean Renart’s Roman de la rose, in which the Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad, rejoices in all things French. To further his cultural conquest of Francophone and Occitanophone culture, lyrics composed in southern regions are supplied with geographical tags that place them on the border with the langue d’oil and are Gallicized. In the subsequent chapter on Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la violette, Zingesser shows a different dynamic...

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