This talk explores the world of names, naming, and namelessness in troubadour songs and in the manuscripts that transmit them. I show how the manuscript lyric anthologies known as chansonniers participate in the name games that are an integral part of troubadour lyric poetics. While names in manuscripts can be important evidence, they do not correspond neatly to modern notions of the author as an individual with a fixed historical identity. By shifting the focus of inquiry to manuscript attributions, and particularly to female author attributions, I demonstrate the complexity of medieval understandings of lyric authorship. I challenge especially certain modern (and often gendered) assumptions about the authorship of troubadour songs, and critique those book historical methods that can reinforce such assumptions. My conclusions are grounded in a new approach to troubadour manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries, but the central issues of textual stability and authorial identity that I address are significant more broadly to both medievalists and modernists. My approach, elaborated in my larger book project, makes possible new ways of understanding the authorship of troubadour song.

Co-sponsored by Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Forum on Research in Medieval Studies, Department of Musicology, and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts