About the Book
From the Middle Ages onwards, writers, artists and composers became self-consciously aware of the vast potential for external references to enrich their works. By evoking canonical texts and their producers from the distant or more recent past, authors demonstrated their respect for tradition while showcasing their own merits. In so doing they also manipulated the memory of their readers.
The essays in this second volume cover a range of topics relevant to medieval Europe and embrace sacred and secular music, historiography, liturgical and biblical studies, sermons and preaching, the architecture of funerary chapels and the role of tombs in literature. As such, each essay explores the themes of the book’s title using a particular body of works from the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance. The book as a whole offers a rich cross-disciplinary discussion of the material in question, with the authors engaging fruitfully with each other’s approaches. The strong line-up includes scholars from the UK, the USA and continental Europe.
Table of Contents:
1.GIULIANO DI BACCO and YOLANDA PLUMLEY Preface
2.ARDIS BUTTERFIELD Introduction
3.R. BARTON PALMER The Rhetoric of Allusion in Machaut’s Fonteinne amoureuse
4.JENNY BENHAM Constructing Memories of Peacemaking
5.LINA BOLZONI The Impassioned Memory in Dante’s Divina commedia
6.ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER Quotation in Medieval Polyphony
7.EMMA CAYLEY Citation as Transvestism in Fifteenth Century French Poetry
8.HELEN DEEMING Music, Memory and Mobility: Citation and Contrafactum in Thirteenth-Century Sequence Repertories
9.SONJA DRIMMER Allusive Images: Intervisuality in Late Middle English Manuscripts?
10.NAOMI HOWELL Sensory Sepulchres: Citations of Christ's Tomb in Twelfth-Century Romance
11.MARGUERITE KEANE Memory and Royal Identity in the Chapel of Blanche of Navarre at Saint Denis
12.TAMSYN ROSE-STEEL "An Unjust and Treacherous Word": the Use of Citational Practices and Language in a Fauvel Motet
13.SJOERD LEVELT Citation and Misappropriation in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britannie
and the Latin Galfridian Tradition
14.JENNIFER SALTZSTEIN Refrain Citation and Vernacular Authority in the Music of Adam de la Halle
About the Author :
Yolanda Plumley is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Exeter and Reader in Medieval Music and Culture. Giuliano Di Bacco is Research Fellow in Medieval Studies at the University of Exeter.
Review :
Like its companion volume, 2011's Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Text, Music, and Image from Machaut to Ariosto (University of Exeter Press), this collection of essays stems from two workshops (on citation in French lyrics and songs) and a conference on "Citation, Intertextuality, and Memory in the Middle Ages" at the University of Exeter. With such a thorough pedigree, it is no surprise that this volume continues the strong tradition of presenting numerous case studies that, taken together, illuminate the nuances of the "complex transitions between memorial and literate negotiations" of citation, quotation, and intertextuality in medieval and Renaissance literature, art, and music (2). The first essay in the collection, Jenny Benham's "Walter Map and Ralph Glaber: Intertextuality and the Construction of Memories of Peacemaking," sets the pattern followed, for the most part, by the following essays: case studies that explore a particular aspect of memory and intertextuality, followed by a section that examines the larger ramifications of those case studies. As Benham explains, even two accounts of a historical meeting might not lead the modern scholar to an accurate understanding of what happens-instead, "it may only confirm the authors' use of citation, allusion, and intertextuality" (16). The theme of the instability of memory-studies continues in Sjoerd Levelt's sprightly essay "Citation and Misappropriation in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie and the Anglo-Latin Historiographical Tradition. Levelt addresse the tradition of Latinate British histories from Bede to Gerald of Wales to argue that each text in that tradition rewrites, with cheeky emendation, its predecessors in order to exploit gaps and, ultimately, speak to a divided audience of the unwitting public and the expert historiographer. As those essays indicate, we are left with textual artifacts of citation, quotation, and intertextuality from which we must reconstruct mental processes and the representation of those processes. The three essays on musical citation explore precisely that theme, beginning with Anna Maria Busse Berger's "Orality, Literacy and Quotation in Medieval Polyphony." Berger examines how medieval musicians (specifically, Perotinus and Oswald von Wolkenstein) engaged their "memorial archive[s]" to conclude that orality and literacy-which we might call two forms of memory-affect medieval polyphonic composition (31). Helen Deeming's "Music, Memory, and Mobility: Citation and Contrafactum in Thirteenth-Century Sequence Repertories" explores contrafactum, the practice of "substituting a new text to an existing song-melody," which has the effect of associating the original text with the new one, creating a "virtual polyphony" in which both songs exist "simultaneously ... in the mind ... of the musician" (68, 69). Memory, citation, and identity are further explored in Jennifer Saltzstein's "Intertextuality and Authorial Self-Representation in the Music of Adam de la Halle"; Adam's self-citation-unusual in medieval musical refrains-creates an intertextual identity for the author. But is an intertextual, constructed identity stable? Both R. Barton Palmer ("Centrifugal Allusion and the Centripetal Text: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut") and Emma Cayley ("Coming Apart at the Seams? Citation as Transvestism in Fifteenth-Century Debate Poetry") emphasize the instability of citation and memory, and how that instability can affect subjectivity. Cayley examines debate poetry and accompanying illustrations to argue that "citation in the Derridean sense and Butlerian gender performance trouble the reader through their erosion of any stable identity or subject position in the text" (66), while Palmer explores the "discontents of authorship and the drama of the self" in Machaut emphasize on the subjectivity of poetic existence (161). Of course, to speak of memory and subjectivity without recourse to passion omits a vital component of existence. Both Lina Bolzoni ("The Impassioned Memory in Dante's Divine Comedy") and Naomi Howell ("Sepulchral Citations in Twelfth-Century Romance") address the emotional effect of memory and intertextuality. Bolzoni links Dante's engagement with mnemotechniques to the emotive context of the spiritual ecstasy of moving towards God and salvation, while Howell shows how the historical debates over imagistic representation, the tradition of ekphrasis, and citations of Christ's Sepulcher illuminate descriptions of tombs in Floire et Blancheflor, and Chretien de Troyes' Cliges and La chevalier de la charrette. Howell's essay, on ekphrastic descriptions of fictional tombs, and Marguerite Keane's essay, "Memory and Royal Identity in the Chapel of Blanche of Navarre at Saint-Denis," emphasize the challenge of memory: it is often all we have of what has been lost, and there is a degree of intellectual and emotional labor that must be done to revivify memory in the mind of the beholder, the reader, and the listener. Keane introduces the term "intervisuality" to explore the operations provoked by images mean to recall other images in the viewer's mind (123), and although Sonja Drimmer's "Visualizing Intertextuality: Conflating Forms of Creativity in Late Medieval 'Author Portraits'" does not use that term, her essay is nonetheless a fascinating exploration of how authors, illuminators, and scribes interact with idealized portrayals of the "creative work" of crafting a book (98) to explore how writing and illustrating environments depicted on the page influence the aspirational work-space goals of the medieval equivalent of the creative class. The cumulative result of these essays is an implication that citation, quotation, intertextuality-the detritus of memory-affects our understanding of the notion of the self, the practices of constructing the self, and the environment through which we engage in those practices. The essays in this volume are organized alphabetically by author's last name. At first blush, that structure can prove jarring as the reader moves from music to debate poetry to art history and back to music; it is for that reason that I have organized this review thematically. However, a discernable concatenation emerges among the variety of case studies on offer. Inquiry into citation is perforce an interdisciplinary one, and to force disciplinarity onto such a complex set of "networks," as Ardris Butterfield describes these connections in her introduction, would a disservice to "the medieval habit of looking backward to look forward, to the use of authoritative texts ... as a way of citing time itself" (2, 5). In "'An Unjust and Treacherous Word': The Use of Citational Practices and Language in a Fauvel Motet," Tamsyn Rose-Steel argues that the "intricate construction" of Fauvel requires a "holistic approach to the words, music and images" used therein, and that approach speaks for the goals of this volume as a whole (163). The organizational method of this collection reinforces the complexity of thinking through medieval and Renaissance citation as a mnemonic technique and a study in memory and epistemology-not to mention, an inter twined experience of emotive and intellectual labor. The overall effect of the collection is to emphasize the fascinating immensity of such a project. A richly textured demonstration of the difference between medieval and modern capacities for memory and understanding of originality and invention in the arts.
