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Speaker(s): Marisa Galvez - The Description of Historical Poetics: The Courtly Crusade Idiom

Dear all -
 
Please join us on Wednesday, 2/15. 6-8pm, in Pigott Hall (Bldg. 260), Room 216 for a workshop with Marisa Galvez, associate professor of French and, by courtesy, of German Studies, who will present an excerpt from her project on crusade poetics. To ensure we order enough food, please RSVP . The precirculated materials can be downloaded from .
 
Of her paper, “The Description of Historical Poetics: The Courtly Crusade Idiom," professor Galvez writes:
 
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This paper draws upon my book project on literary texts and cultural artifacts that treat crusade during the period of 1150-1290 in Western Europe and the Latin East. We can locate lyrical translations of crusades within and across texts, and various situations of possibility through time and space. These lyrical modalities and postures of crusade resist hermeneutic paradigms (i.e. confession, the theological and historical discourse of Holy War) through poetic reconfigurations of figures, people, places, and objects. A descriptive historical poetics makes visible adaptive, localized and creative constellations of 'speaking crusades.’ The courtly crusade idiom is often misinterpreted as an articulation of a spiritual inner self due to its relation to the practice and theorization of confession at this time. Instead, I show that a historical poetics of description can show an idiom that concerns earthly status, a profession—rather than confession—of crusade active among social relations and within specific configurations time and place. 
The paper discusses three “crusader-poets” the trouvère—Thibaut de Champagne, the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, and the Frankish Cypriot Jehan de Journi—through three descriptive modes of the courtly crusade idiom: what I call “adjacency,” “genre existence,” and “sonic reconfigurations.” First, in the lyric corpus of Thibaut we see “adjacency”—a material togetherness of various texts related to Thibaut and his domain Champagne that is a quality of location outside of traditional conventions of manuscript compilation and analogue; second, in the works of Raimbaut there is a “genre existence” of a crusader-poet within and across manuscripts but dependent upon specific conditions of cultural milieus and mentalités of northern Italy in the twelfth century; and finally in the contrafacture of liturgical songs in his confessional texts, the “sonic reconfigurations” of the Cypriot Jehan Journi show creative adaptations of the crusade idiom as a bi-directional activity between France and Cyprus, and “crusade” as a localized aesthetic act.
A procedure of this sort locates an idiom within, across, and against historical discourses of language (the reconfiguration of courtly lyric), culture (the emergence of penitential discourse, troubadours in twelfth-century northern Italian courts) and materiality (the shaping of an idiom by a manuscript culture over time). 
 
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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. Her recent book,  (University of Chicago Press, 2012) was awarded John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America.