When we read medieval verse, it’s often in the pages of an anthology: a product of editorial efforts to collect and present a body of poems under a coherent category, in a way that promotes the texts’ clarity and legibility for a modern reader. While these collections are convenient and instructive, for the critic, the coherences they produce are multiply distorting. On the one hand, medieval lyrics did not circulate in neatly typeset and glossed editions, but variably and messily under the sign of Zumthorian mouvance. On the other, medieval poems were more linguistically gregarious in manuscript than our monolingual anthologies suggest. Indeed, medieval poems travelled and mingled across regional, cultural, and linguistic divides, tracing complex itineraries that can disappear under the grid of the modern university’s language-based disciplinary lines. David Murray’s Poetry in Motion strives to lift this grid and dispel the illusion of editorial transparency in its ranging account of the love lyric as a potent uniter of courts, languages, and literary traditions across high medieval Europe. The handsomely produced book offers accomplished close readings and manuscript assessments that query what a lyric is and what it can do, paying special attention to the movement of lyric materials and languages across space and time. Poetry in Motion demonstrates the vitality of venerable philological approaches and the rewards of comparative study. At the same time, its argumentative positioning against postcolonial and global approaches to the Middle Ages unnecessarily invents political and intellectual adversaries, introduces conceptual and argumentative instabilities, and generally hinders the realization of a project with genuine potential.
Murray’s introduction maps out the conceptual landscape organizing the book and its corpus of medieval poems. Lyric designates “a particularized kind of expression outside the bounds of normal spoken discourse, and one therefore worth careful critique, preservation, and dissemination” among medieval poets, singers, and audiences--and, implicitly, among present day readers (14). Focusing on the period c.1140-1350, Murray emphasizes lyric’s mobility between written and oral reception and transmission, and, crucially for his project, across languages, courtly milieux, and geopolitical regions. Poetry in Motion focuses on the formal means by which lyric poetry circulated within a cosmopolitan European environment and thereby contributed to the development of “a supra-regional courtly discourse” (21) in which lyric figures large. This notion receives further elaboration in Chapter 2, where we read of medieval poetic efforts to create a “non-specific Romance koiné”to support “the seamlessly pan-European nature of courtly culture” (104). The historical verity of this homogenized European culture is taken for granted, one of the monograph’s shortcomings, to which I return below. Citing Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1992),Murray argues that lyrics “affirm[ed] the community of medieval poets as a body undefined by linguistic boundaries” and instead bound by a shared lyrical and courtly idiom (21-22). To explore this idiom, Poetry in Motion draws its texts from a variety of medieval European vernaculars in an effort to counter monolingual approaches to medieval literature that, Murray rightly points out, anachronistically replicate modern national, linguistic, and disciplinary divisions. Herein lies one of the book’s standout strengths: dexterous handling of an array of scholarly conversations usually siloed within area- or language-based disciplinary niches. Poetry in Motion marshals these conversations with confidence to help build a narrative of the “largely non-linear, polycentric expansion” of medieval courtly lyric discourse, best told through careful philological examination of lyric texts and their manuscripts.
Each of the subsequent chapters studies one “mode of mobility” through which medieval lyric poetry circulated inside this pan-European courtly milieu, paying special attention to discursive sites where these poems cross and confront the linguistic boundaries they aspire to transcend. Chapter 1 examines the technique of contrafacture--whereby a song’s poetic form and/or melody are retained in subsequent lyric rewritings to create an intertextual chain--through a classic troubadour example, Bernart de Ventadorn’s popular “Can vei la lauzeta mover.” The poems the chapter assembles range from the twelfth to fifteenth century in Occitan, Old French, Latin, Middle High German, Galician-Portuguese, and Catalan. They hold few surprises--“Can vei”’s contrafacta are well documented--but Murray’s close readings are subtle and skillful. Some particularly striking insights arise in this and later chapters when Murray attends to the dialogue between musical form and poetic text, even when surviving manuscript witnesses have no music notation. Bernart’s “Can vei” ultimately manifests as a “constant spectral presence” (82) that binds together contrafacta across space and time; the song operates as an “impulse” that “move[s] through poetic networks...[a]cross linguistic frontiers” (53) as it points back to its origins, even when audiences have forgotten the troubadour and his lyric.
At the end of chapter 1, “Can vei” reveals itself as a poetic agent that hovers just outside, while dependent upon, the contingencies of its makers, audiences, and material inscriptions. As with lyric across Poetry in Motion, Bernart’s song leans into the modern work-concept: when Murray considers the circulation of lyrics, he is not interested in the movement of parchment, poets, and performers, but rather in the more abstract movement of the poem-as-work through distributed discursive space. Chapters 2 and 3 extend this sense in their consideration of multilingual poetry and lyric insertions as “modes of mobility.” Chapter 2 begins by reflecting on medieval theories of language, synthesized from the writings of thirteenth-century modistae, Raimon Vidal’s Razos de trobar, and Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia. Murray identifies tension between medieval grammarians’ faith in a singular ydioma uniting all languages, and medieval stylistic regard for a hierarchy of linguistically distinct vernaculars. The grammarians’ singular ydioma aligns with Murray’s “pan-European courtly lyric which is not the preserve of any one language” (99) around which Poetry in Motion is conceptually organized. The remainder of the chapter considers how polyglot texts negotiate their internal linguistic difference as they triangulate legibility within this shared ydioma. Texts range from Dante’s trilingual “Aï faus ris” and Oswald von Wolkenstein’s heptalingual “Do fraig Amors” to the English macaronic “De amico ad amicam.” Murray’s close readings of these familiar texts again demonstrate consideration and nuance, identifying in the multilingual poems “a growing interest in dissolving the boundaries between languages, and in bringing the same unity to communication as had been brought to the vocabulary of love” (137).
The medieval lyric most resembles the modern conception of an autonomous work of art in chapter 3, which considers lyric quotation and insertion as “a European phenomenon” that circulates poetry “as a form of wisdom or knowledge...[whose] value lies in its intellectual freight.” This cultural knowledge “is built into the very form of lyric, the proper appreciation of which requires special audience engagement” (140) endemic to local social and aesthetic networks. As quotation and insertion move lyrics further from their origin in place, time, and language, Murray argues, this context erodes, the cognoscenti who can detect the wisdom encoded in lyric form dwindle, and citational authority shifts in at times unpredictable ways. Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern account of citationality frames Murray’s exploration of the mobile authority of lyric insertions in Matfre’s Breviari d’amor, Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and Vita nuova, and Renart’s Roman de la rose, among other poems. By the chapter’s end, medieval citational practices reveal “lyrical form and the meaning of song [to be] a mode of communication above and beyond its contents” (189). Lyrics connect and generate networks of intellectual knowledge through form, to the extent that lyric content and language seem to almost disappear: “to be lyric is itself enough” (190).
If chapter 3 tends to reify medieval lyric as form, as a proper “language-system” (194) for the movement of cultural knowledge, chapter 4 remembers the sociopolitical life of lyrics, as expressed through linguistic and stylistic choice. Here, Murray collects a variety of thirteenth-century lyrics from Iberia, Italy, and Bohemia written in non-native vernaculars, and considers how this freighted choice of foreign idiom sponsored literary experimentation at linguistic boundaries and contact zones, even as it accrued to the political ambitions of patrons or the cultural positioning of courts. This is perhaps Poetry in Motion’s most stimulating chapter for its reevaluation of Occitan and Middle High German works created at cultural margins that have tended to be dismissed as poor imitations of national literatures. Murray instead reads them as “silenced moments of plural literary histories” that must be accounted for if we wish to discard unhelpful nationalist and disciplinary biases from our literary-historical work. In his readings of Cerverì de Girona, the scuola poetica siciliana, the Trevisan Novellino, and geblüemte rede poemsof the later Přemyslid period, Murray detects subtle and playful negotiations between the conventions of prestige languages and literatures and the aesthetic and cultural style of the foreign environs in which those languages were put to poetic use. The mobility of lyric quotations and insertions in Chapter 3 finds a parallel at the level of language in chapter 4, as vernaculars travel, command authority outside their place of origin, and sponsor new lyric productions. Paraphrasing María Rosa Menocal’s Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the Lyric (1994) on the plural and global origins of medieval Europe’s poetic tradition, Murray concludes the chapter with the affirmation that “poetry as a whole...always comes from somewhere else” (245-246).
In light of this affirmation, it comes as something of a surprise when Poetry in Motion’s Conclusion begins by dismissing the scholarly field to which Menocal was a founding contributor, and to which increasing numbers of medieval scholars contribute today. “This study places itself in the tradition of pan-European medieval studies in the manner of Curtius’ Europäische Literatur im lateinischen Mittelalter,” Murray writes. “It thus sets itself against more recent scholarly trends such as the globalized Middle Ages and the adoption of post-colonial theory in medieval studies” (147). It is unclear what Murray seeks to gain by this rather arch, pseudo-political jab. Not only is it dismissive and unnecessary, it goes on to misunderstand the scholarship these fields produce, a point to which I shortly return, and runs counter to the politics of the text it cites as model: Curtius explicitly wrote his influential 1948 philological study “under pressure of a concrete historical situation,” to wit, as a response to Germany’s völkish and fascist cultural narratives. [1] As Menocal writes in Shards of Love, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages “explicitly asks to be read ideologically and to consider the fundamentally ideological role which literature always plays.” [2]
Were I in the position to advise Murray while his book was under preparation, rather than reviewing it after its publication, I might have urged him to take his cue from this ideological Curtius and, under the pressure of the concrete historical situation of medieval studies in our present day, to read and listen more carefully to the scholarship he dismisses. Poetry in Motion would have been a demonstrably stronger study for it--first and foremost, because much of the book in concept and argument is actually harmonious with the global and postcolonial approaches it critiques. Murray is in league with scholars of medieval Arabic, Ge’ez, Old Nubian, Classical Persian, and other global medieval languages when he directs his study “against national literary historical models prevalent since the nineteenth century” and the “institutional Balkanization” that constrains our imagination and understanding of the medieval world (22). I see genuine reciprocity between Murray’s critiques of modern editorial practice (249) and Nahir Otaño Gracia’s antiracist critique of modern English translations of Icelandic sagas, and between Murray’s fascination with linguistic “collision” at cultural contact zones (194) and Barbara Lalla’s postcolonial study of Middle English language and literature in the wake of the Norman Conquest. [3]
Lalla’s work is an excellent example of how global and postcolonial medieval studies do not, as Murray claims, unduly “privilege encounter with the ‘other’ over considerations of similitude...[and] prefer the interactions of widely-separated people to those of closer neighbors” (147). Scholarship in these fields as often turns its attention to the stranger residing in the European within: the Welsh, the Irish, the conquered inhabitants of England; the Jew, the Romani nomad, the immigrant, the converso. The prompt to remember these Europeans could have productively expanded Poetry in Motion’s archive beyond the writings of the white, male, Christian, Western poets that fill its pages. How might the pan-European unity Murray describes look different, for example, if we read the poems of Todros ben Meir Halevi Abulafia, Jewish lyricist in the court of Alfonso X, or of the amply studied and edited trobaritz? These “others” are part of the pan-European landscape, too; they are equally a part of the courtly milieux Poetry in Motion seeks to describe, and so must have a place in the narration of a presumptive pan-European medieval lyric tradition.
A synthetic rather than antagonistic approach to global and postcolonial medieval studies might have also helped identify and correct the first of Poetry in Motion’s two most pressing conceptual problems, centered on the terms “Europe” and “lyric.” I have alluded to the problem of “Europe” already: Murray uses the term as homogenous and self-evident, yet its indefinition engenders argumentative instability, especially in chapter 4, where we are invited to think about the life of prestige literary languages at geographically marginal sites. How we register European marginality depends on what “Europe” refers to, whether a continent, a modern geopolitical region, or a medieval geopolitical imaginary. If Cerverí de Girona’s Iberia counts as part of “Europe” (195), how much of the peninsula counts, at what moment in history, as determined by whom? Al-Andalus controls significant territory in Iberia for at least the first 70 years of Poetry in Motion’s date range; is the Arabic and Hebrew literature written and read in Muslim Iberia part of the European tradition, too--and if not, why not? [4] Similar questions could be asked of medieval Sicily, another of Murray’s marginal sites, where Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Italian vernaculars were heard at least through the 1240s. When Czech-speaking territories only appear in the chapter on European margins, and when Hungarian and Slovenian only briefly appear in Oswald von Wolkenstein’s polyglot verse, how do these territories count as “European,” and, crucially, to what degree is their marginality a reflex of a modern political designation like the former Soviet Bloc--that is, the kind of designation Murray seeks to eliminate? In raising these points, I do not mean to suggest that medievalists must master Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Slovenian in addition to the more familiar medieval European vernaculars before they can write a book like Poetry in Motion. We have only so much time on this earth. I do, though, want to indicate the conceptual and argumentative straits that result when a term like “Europe” is employed unreflectively, and to indicate how digging into the wider conversations attending these terms only serves to further strengthen our inquiry.
Similar problems of indefinition attend the term “lyric,” used interchangeably with “song,” “poem,” and “text” across the book. What a lyric is, where to find it, how to read it, and how it produces meaning are topics of energetic debate today, most vigorously under the banner of New Lyric Studies. [5] Within medieval studies, publications like Ardis Butterfield’s “Why Medieval Lyric?” (2015) and Ingrid Nelson’s Lyric Tactics (2016) have crucially reshaped what we understand “lyric” to designate with respect to medieval manuscript, literary, musical, and performance cultures. [6] Instead of engaging with these studies, Poetry in Motion relies on a model of the poem-as-work, whose meaning resides in its form as it floats outside the vicissitudes of material history. This model bears strong resemblance to the autonomous, ahistorical lyric New Criticism elevated as the literary object par excellence. The notion of the poem-as-work is not itself anachronistic by default--chansonniers, for example, might be taken to theorize a notion of the work in their compilatory strategies. However, when the version of the poem-as-work that emerges from medieval materials so neatly resembles the New Critical lyric, and when it does so in a monograph that is proudly traditional in its methodology, it is difficult to avoid the impression that a tautology is at work, in the absence of explicit argumentation otherwise.
There is no question that Murray is a skilled reader of medieval poems, that he thinks creatively about medieval lyric cultures, that he employs philological tools resourcefully, or that his polyglot commitments are salubrious for the linguistically fractured study of medieval literary traditions.Poetry in Motion abundantly demonstrates all of these strengths. He is a scholar with much to contribute; my hope is that his future contributions turn a broader and more generous ear to the wide ambit of critical thinking relevant to his project. Listening more actively and more openly to more voices will yield scholarship that is not just more interesting but also demonstrably stronger.
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Notes:
1. Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) xxvi, qtd. Avihu Zakai, “Two Responses to the German Crisis of Philology: Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach,” in Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology (New York: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017), 51-58 at 54.
2. María Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 133, qtd. Zakai, “Two Responses,” 55.
3. Nahir Otaño Gracia, “Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd,” Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545; Barbara Lalla,Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008).
4. See David Wacks, “Whose Spain is it, Anyway?” in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, eds. A. Albin, M. Erler, T. O'Donnell, N. Paul and N. Rowe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 181-190.
5. See Stephanie Burt, “What Is This Thing Called Lyric?” Modern Philology 113.3 (Feb 2016): 422-440; and Elizabeth Helsinger, “What Is This Thing Called Song?” Modern Language Quarterly 79.4 (2018): 397–419.
6. Ardis Butterfield, “Why Medieval Lyric?” ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015): 319-343; Ingrid Nelson, Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).