Marisa Galvez Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe . Marisa Galvez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. ix+281.
2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/674634
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeMarisa Galvez Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe. Marisa Galvez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. ix+281.Jennifer SaltzsteinJennifer SaltzsteinUniversity of Oklahoma Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDuring the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, large-scale corpora of vernacular song begin to be preserved in writing for the first time. Song can be found in many different forms and manuscript contexts: interpolated into narrative works, tucked into large miscellanies, and gathered into carefully ordered songbooks. In her monograph, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe, Marisa Galvez focuses on the nature and purpose of the songbook and the ways in which medieval songbooks work to establish expectations about the poets and lyrics within their pages. Her aim is to view these songbooks as living entities and communal objects that establish a system of values for lyric that is rhetorical, biographical, and phenomenological. In her words, “Songbooks embody the beginnings of these great lyric traditions, and the choices made in gathering them into codices undoubtedly shaped the history of later poetry in these languages. And yet it has never been asked, in a comprehensive study, whether songbooks of different national traditions have common properties, or how songbooks enable us to understand the process that sees a song made permanent in manuscript or print, allows a series of songs to tell a story in a book, and creates productive tensions within these changes” (1). Songbook builds on a variety of studies that have considered questions of compilatio and ordinatio in the context of vernacular culture, emphasizing the collaborative ways in which medieval songbooks were most likely produced, the agency of their scribes and compilers, and the ways in which they work to re-create (or perhaps even create whole-cloth) authorial personae for the songs they contain. Influential studies by Sylvia Huot, as well as by Olivia Holmes, Stephen Nichols, and William Burgwinkle, among others, have illuminated these issues in the context of medieval Occitan, Old French, and Italian lyric traditions.1 What Songbook offers is a rare comparative approach to this rich material, bringing Latin, Occitan, Old French, German, and Castilian songbooks into a productive dialogue.2 Galvez focuses on eight medieval manuscripts that preserve medieval works such as the Cantigas de Santa Maria (ca. 1270–90), the Carmina Burana (ca. 1230), Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor (ca. 1288), as well as the songs of Guillaume IX, Bernart de Ventadorn, Giraut de Riquier, Walter von der Vogelweide, and others. In her exploration of these case studies, Galvez provides an impressive synthesis of secondary literature in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish while demonstrating the value of a comparative approach to medieval lyric traditions, which are most often separated into national traditions by our modern scholarly disciplines.In her book’s introduction, Galvez offers a theory of the songbook as an emergent genre that establishes a particular horizon of expectations for its readers. Galvez defines the genre of the songbook as a multiauthor and anonymous lyric anthology that displays an overriding organizational principle (that is, it functions as a collection). For the purposes of her study, the songbook genre does not include books that provide musical notation to accompany lyric texts, single-author lyric anthologies, or manuscripts that transmit narrative or prose works alongside lyric texts. Her aim is to describe the multiauthor and anonymous lyric anthology as an emergent genre that would eventually become an autonomous, self-sustaining form as a songbook (3). The book’s case studies illuminate different ways in which the organization, decoration, rubrication, and emendation of medieval songbooks were intended to prompt readers to particular interpretations of their contents. In the four chapters that follow her introduction, Galvez examines these case studies from a wide variety of methodological perspectives.Chapter 1 argues that scribes and compilers use the scholastic principles of ordinatio and compilatio to encourage particular interpretations of the songs of the Carmina Burana and Libro de buen amor. These interpretations, she argues, never become monolithic; in the case of the former, Galvez states, “I will describe in detail how we can distinguish the Carmina Burana as a work space that, through the versus, various principles of groupings, and the vernacular stanzas composed or added by the compilers, allows diverse approaches to the collection within certain parameters” (25). Galvez argues that in some cases the principles of ordering seem to function as a suggestion to readers to arrive at specific interpretations, whereas in others there is no particular relationship between the diverse bodies of poetic material contained within the manuscript. This divergence attests to “the varied ways readers interpreted the material” (38). Galvez compares this aspect of the Carmina Burana to the relationship between the refrain lyrics of the Libro de buen amor, in which “the ad hoc composition of original vernacular refrains to Latin songs enables relations between texts in the book and multiple readings of an individual song” (53).Whereas Galvez argues that these songbooks guide their readers to adopt multiple strategies of interpretation, chapter 2 explores the ways in which names and the act of naming can function as a scribal attempt to create greater coherence across the contents of an anthology. Galvez explores the lyric persona in troubadour song as a product of the songbook, a product that “depends upon its presentation of lyrics under the claim of historical and cultural authenticity” and creates a stable identity for the poet (57). This chapter focuses on naming, particularly songs that include acts of self-naming, and examines how these instances interact with manuscript rubrics, such that the name functions “as a repository of cultural knowledge that both stabilizes signification and acts as a performed signifier” (84).In chapter 3, Galvez examines the role of images in guiding readers toward particular interpretations. Galvez argues that the author portraits of troubadour chansonniers N and R “provide visual strategies for reading troubadour lyric” that highlight the moral or political readings of the lyrics they contain (103). Through representations of Alfonso X and Frederick II, Galvez explores the exploitation of troubadour imagery by medieval kings. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Codex Manesse ; the abundant imagery of this songbook invites readers to adopt specific impressions of the songs and poets it preserves. Galvez argues that the frequent appearance of scrolls and images of writing coupled with the rhetorical strategies latent in the usage of image constitute a strategy that “ennobles secular lyric, and teaches lay readers the cultural value of Minnesang ” (156). The fourth chapter examines the Castilian cancineros of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which, Galvez argues, represent “a testing ground for rising notions of humanism and the social and ethical role of poetry” (201).The book closes with a historiographical essay entitled “Songbook Medievalisms,” in which Galvez explores the impact of modern classificatory manuals and critical editions on our understanding of the songbook as a genre, arguing that “in their production of songbooks, postmedieval readers and scholars dismantled or reinforced the medieval songbook in ways that reflect personal interests and cultural priorities of the age” (205). Modern critical tools, she argues, reinforced the organizing principle of the author by translating the fluid medieval literary persona into a rigid, modern biographical construct. This conclusion reinforces Galvez’s principal departure from earlier scholarship on medieval songbooks, namely, her critique that earlier accounts have constructed songbooks as precursors to the single-author codex rather than as an enduring genre in their own right.3Galvez’s arguments focus on the ways in which the organization, rubrication, and illustration of songbooks are designed to aid their readers and guide their interpretation. Ironically, the execution of Songbook occasionally renders her arguments unnecessarily opaque. Songbook is richly illustrated with black-and-white figures of the images under discussion as well as seven full-color plates. Although all the images are numbered, the discussions of the images are not consistently cued to their numbers. In many instances, the reader must page through the book, searching in the image captions for the manuscript siglum referred to in the text in order to find the image described. Chapter 3 is considerably more difficult to navigate than it would have been if the images were reliably referred to by number; in at least one instance, the cue mistakenly refers to the manuscript folio number when the image number was intended (154). Small errors such as these are compounded by inconsistencies in text presentation and some tortuous prose. Galvez’s sophisticated ideas could have been presented to the reader with greater clarity.This book is erudite and its analyses are elegant. I was left with questions, however, in my attempts to discern the relationship between Galvez’s fascinating case studies and the claims expressed in her subtitle (How Lyrics Became Poetry) and thesis: “This book argues that what we consider ‘poetry’ is built on the remains of lyrics seen in the material formation of the songbook” (5). The usage of the term “lyric” is often vague in studies of medieval literature, yet most scholars use “lyric” in opposition to poetry and/or narrative verse to indicate texts that were destined, whether in reality or in fiction, for sung delivery.4 What differentiates lyrics from poetry for Galvez? How do the strategies of reading that her study illuminates so convincingly demonstrate a shift from one to the other within these manuscripts? Is Galvez’s point that songbooks were designed to be appreciated visually and intellectually through the act of reading rather than through the acts of hearing and performance? Songbook can be read productively in the context of other recent accounts by Emma Dillon and Elizabeth Eva Leach that illuminate how medieval manuscripts could communicate on both visual and aural levels without privileging either one, as well as by Joyce Coleman’s work, which shows that even as the technology of the book became firmly established, the public performance of medieval texts endured.5Although they may not accomplish exactly what the author claims, the case studies in this book are of enormous value. They expand our sense of the connectivity of medieval vernacular song traditions and the mechanisms through which they were conceptualized in and transformed by writing. One hopes that Galvez’s approach will inspire more comparative research on these and other songbooks across linguistic traditions. Notes 1See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). See also Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Stephen G. Nichols, “‘Art’ and ‘Nature’: Looking for (Medieval) Principles of Order in Occitan Chansonnier N (Morgan 819),” in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Venzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 83–122; and William Burgwinkle, “The Chansonniers as Books,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246–62.2For recent accounts of medieval vernacular song that bring different linguistic traditions into dialogue, see Judith A. Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (Oxford University Press, 2011); and John Haines, Medieval Song in Romance Languages (Cambridge University Press, 2010).3Other scholars who have argued against aspects of this influential thesis (particularly as expressed by Sylvia Huot in From Song to Book) include Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).4For a helpful discussion of the scholarly usage of the term “lyric,” see Butterfield, Poetry and Music, 224–26.5See, e.g., Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Medieval Music-Making and the ‘Roman de Fauvel’ (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Poetry, and Nature in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 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