Francophone Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Poetry in Medieval France
Department: European Languages and Studies
Date and Time: April 28, 2014 | 12:00 PM-2:00 PMEvent Location: HIB 137
Event Details
Francophone Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Literature in Northern France (1200-1400) explores the reception of Occitan lyric in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is, in the period corresponding to the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and its aftermath, which witnessed France’s political and cultural annexation of Occitania. It shows how Occitan poems—from the very beginning of their French reception—were subtly incorporated into a francophone canon by way of imitation, compilation with French texts, and adaptation to the French sound system. By extension, it show how the linguistic and cultural specificity of troubadour lyric was suppressed in its early francophone transmission. Perhaps because of the success of this process of assimilation, the troubadours have usually been treated as unproblematic forebears of the trouvères, their northern French “imitators.” This view retrospectively projects the current political boundaries of France onto the medieval political and cultural landscape, and obscures the process by which Occitania was made French.
Eliza Zingesser works primarily on medieval French and Occitan literature, often with a focus on issues of assimilation, multilingualism, cultural and linguistic contact, and gender and sexuality. She is currently writing two books. The first, “French Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Poetry in Medieval France,” explores the reception of Occitan lyric poetry in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is, in the period corresponding to the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and its aftermath, which witnessed France’s annexation of the majority of Occitania. The second book, “Borderlands: Intercultural Encounters in the Medieval French Pastourelle,” explores how pastoral literature—especially pastourelle poetry—, became a privileged site for French explorations of cultural and linguistic difference in the Middle Ages.
Free and open to the public.
For event information, please contact Ève Célia Morisi (emorisi@uci.edu).