Stolen Song - by Eliza Zingesser (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book documents for the first time the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French, and the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history--a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing song"--

Book Synopsis

Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history--a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs.

Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the "Frenchness" of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history.

Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

Review Quotes

Stolen Song is a testament to Zingesser's incisive powers of analysis.

-- "Digital Philology"

Stolen Song offers a welcome, fresh perspective on a medieval past. Zingesser's arguments are convincingly parsed out with great care and are solidly founded by primary source study alongside forerunning secondary scholarship, especially that of Sarah Kay--an obviously significant influence.

-- "Comitatus"

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.

-- "Tenso"

Demonstrat[ing] a solid knowledge of her corpus and of the narratives she discusses... Eliza Zingesser offers readers a new way of reading Old French literature, looking at the adoption and conversion of materials to new purposes. She makes a strong case that medieval French authors subsumed Occitan.

-- "SPECULUM"

Zingesser approaches her carefully designed corpus through a persuasive combination of historical apprehension, manuscript expertise, close reading, and theory. She skillfully guides her readers through a vast amount of data with a clear, always elegant style.

-- "H-France"

About the Author

Eliza Zingesser is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.