Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather
than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the
earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions.
Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally
produced and received--a collaboration of artists, performers, live
audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies.
The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook 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. Marisa Galvez
analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of
Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by
which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of
oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an
established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks--in ways that
resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and
playlists--contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts
selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of
their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the
historical foundations of their field and especially the national
literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination
of the songbook's role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant
than ever.
