Some of the most interesting writing on folklore, it seems, is not really about folklore at all. Perhaps this is because it has always been one of folklore studies’ central tasks to ask what folklore is, and what folklore becomes at the seemingly eternal moment when it disappears.

On the surface of it, there is little folkloric about the material discussed by Marisa Galvez in Songbook, her study of (as the subtitle puts it) How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe. The orally composed and performed “lyrics” that existed at the beginning of this historical process came from a specialized courtly tradition, which may have reflected and refracted certain popular and vernacular figures, but which was apparently propagated with minimal involvement of what might be called a “folk” in any reasonably discriminating definition of the term (pace Dundes 1965, 2). And the written “poetry” that was born out of oral lyric was just as aristocratic and, of course, lacked even the typical traits of oral transmission. Nevertheless, the formal process analyzed in Galvez’s book should be of great interest to the study of folklore, which still struggles to come to grips with the fact that much of our contemporary knowledge about and appreciation of folklore is the result of how oral tradition has been written down.

Galvez offers us one of the most detailed studies to date of the process by which an oral genre is transformed through the process of writing. In this way, she adds to the long-standing but none too prolific literature on what might be called the poetics of writing—that is, formal effects of writing as such, as distinct from oral communication. Galvez does not, however, focus on the larger socio-cultural implications of written and printed culture, as has been done by the likes of Ong (1982), Goody and Watt (1963), and Anderson (1991), or on the political significance of writing and re-writing certain allegedly oral tales, as discussed for example by Zipes (2002) and Bauman and Briggs (2003). Instead, she writes more in the line of Lord and Parry (Lord 1960), emphasizing the complexly mediated interfaces of specific oral and written texts. Yet unlike Lord and Parry, who were compelled to speculate about the origins of Homeric literature on the basis of an entirely different oral tradition flourishing millennia later, Galvez is able to reconstruct with considerable precision the historical process of writing-down.

In six densely wrought chapters (including an extensive introduction and a conclusion), Galvez lays out the elaborate semiotic mechanisms through which oral traditions of medieval song, especially those associated with southern European troubadours, gave birth to a related yet distinct set of written literature. Over time the figures of the singer and the lyricist, whose identities were hardly registered in early songbooks, were joined by the figure of the “poet,” whose name provided unity and authority to collections of written texts. In the process, there came into being something like what we now know as “poetry,” a genre of text detachable from performance but inseparable from its author and his or (eventually) her subjectivity.

It is at this point that Galvez’s argument seems to branch out into two different arguments, which are never entirely reconciled. One argument, suggested by the book’s subtitle, would appear to be genealogical, showing “how lyrics became poetry.” In the end, however, Galvez does not say a great deal about “poetry” in the modern sense. In fact, the only part of the book that is structured as something like a search for origins is chapter 2, which discusses the rise of the notion of authorship. Other chapters focus on other features of the songbook genre, such as the way songbook texts encouraged audience participation (chapter 1) or collective authorship (chapter 4), how text interacted with image (chapter 3), and how songbook texts helped structure and mobilize specific political regimes, a point which, incidentally, suggests that the establishment of poetry as an autonomous aesthetic genre meant anything but its depoliticization, as is often assumed in modern discussions of “autonomous” art (chapter 4).

All this seems to suggest that Galvez’s chief concern is less genealogical and diachronic than it is generic and synchronic. The book, in other words, is less about its subtitle than it is about its title, the formal specificity of the songbook itself. The songbook is not presented as a mere waystation between oral tradition and modern poetry, but as a genre in its own right with its own set of values and rules. This, it seems to me, is what is of greatest value in Galvez’s book, and it is regrettable that she does not take more time to summarize and generalize from her many specific findings. Nevertheless, in bits and pieces her observations can help folklorists to begin to come to terms with of this type of material, which is neither strictly oral nor strictly written. Although folklorists now recognize that folklore is rarely available in pure form, we still derive most of our analytic tools from pure folklore as an imagined ideal type, with the occasional admixture of tools derived from purely literary theory. What lies between folklore and literature is rarely understood in its own terms.

When we ask, as Lord and Parry did, if the Homeric epics are a product of a literary mind or of oral lore, we may have already missed the point. Like the songbooks discussed by Galvez, it is probable that the Homeric epics could only have been both and neither, products of the borderlands between the written and the oral, which, like most borderlands, not only exist between other things but also have a topography of their own, even while this topography is shaped by the tension between what lies on both its sides. The medieval songbook, like the works of Homer, like the Decameron, the 1001 Nights, the Kalevala, and so many other compelling and fascinating works, would seem to gain power from its ambiguous position at the edge of competing and potentially conflicting (but also sometimes mutually reinforcing) media. Great works of art, after all, often emerge at moments of social as well as generic instability; and what offers more opportunity for creativity than the instability of literature itself at the very moment of its birth—which, thankfully, never ceases to be repeated?

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dundes, Alan, ed. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. 1963. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5:304–45.

Lord, Albert Bates. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Zipes, Jack David. 2002. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

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[Review length: 1154 words • Review posted on March 18, 2015]