Stanford Humanities Center
This is an Archive of a Past Event
Speaker: Marisa Galvez
Marisa Galvez specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. At Stanford, she currently teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance French literature and love lyric, as well as interdisciplinary upper level courses on the medieval imaginary in modern literature, film, and art.
Her recent book, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category, “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. The first comparative study of songbooks, the book concerns three vernacular traditions—Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian—and analyzes how the songbook emerged from its original performance context of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and finally became a literary object that performs the interests of poets and readers.
Meeting description:
Marisa Galvez analyzes the crusade love song “Aler m’estuet” by the trouvère the Châtelain d’Arras (first quarter of the 13th c.). Read against sermons and homiletic texts by Bernard of Clairvaux, Innocent III, and Maurice of Sully, the song articulates the trouvère’s authentic crusade intention. If the goal of confession is recognition and sorrow for one’s sins leading to reconciliation with God, then the poet avoids this confession and establishes his penitential intention through the remembrance of the lady. Through the courtly aesthetic, the trouvère valorizes and authorizes his crusading through an unrepentant and ambivalent avowal of leave-taking. This kind of professional voice of externalized, erotic self-constraint, as opposed to the confessional voice of internalized penitential self-examination, inspires him for crusade without having to repent the courtly code of fine amour. The song reflects his public’s valorization of both earthly and spiritual sacrifice for crusade.
