This book turns the spotlight on the medieval practice of quoting the troubadours. Passages from a line to almost eighty lines in length are quoted verbatim in a wide range of vernacular (mostly Occitan) texts dating from the turn of the twelfth to thirteenth century to at least the middle of the fourteenth. Although the Latin Middle Ages is known for what Antoine Compagnon has called its monographie—the weaving together of textual authorities to form a single self-confirming discourse promoting the oneness of truth—this careful quoting of troubadour poetry is without precedent or parallel in other vernacular literatures. Yet it has by and large escaped comment until now. While the quotations concerned have mostly been identified and some (notably Dante’s) have been analyzed in their own context, they have never been studied together as a cultural phenomenon.
I situate this practice in the wider context of troubadour transmission, and this has led me to propose the distinction, captured in this book’s title, between the parrots’ and the nightingales’ modes of reception. What I call the nightingales’ way is already familiar to historians of medieval poetry. It involves the gradual take-up of troubadour-inspired poetry among neighboring cultures by poets such as the trouvères, Minnesänger, and writers of the Sicilian school. The aspect of this transmission that is closest to the parrots’ way but also points to the differences between them is the practice of inserting lyrics into romances, to which I devote Chapter 5. Instead of being carefully quoted, the Occitan lyrics in Guillaume de Dole are likened by Jean Renart to blots or stains, performed at the same time as other songs, linguistically mangled, bereft of precise or accurate attribution, and subordinated to French women’s song.
What I call the parrots’ way is typical of the cultures contiguous with Occitania along the northern Mediterranean. It differs from the well-known nightingales’ trajectory in a number of ways. Primary among these are fidelity to the original language of the troubadours (instead of its adaptation to the local vernacular); commitment to accurately preserving and repeating troubadour texts (rather than recreating or reworking them); and privileging them as sources and objects of knowledge. For whereas the nightingales’ way foregrounds the capacity of the lyric to voice sentiment (even though it may frame that sentiment with irony), the parrots’ way underlines the knowledge that troubadour songs convey and their value as themselves constituting a field of knowledge. By inducing the troubadours to speak less about desire and more about their knowledge of desire, the parrots’ way sustains a desire for knowledge through poetry. This lends it a scholastic quality, and indeed the kinds of texts that contain quotation are similar to Latin pedagogical or didactic works, particularly those concerned with the teaching of Latin grammar and poetry. The scholastic focus of the parrots’ way also results in a relative disinterest in music as compared with text, though there are exceptions where, with a nod to the nightingales, music reasserts its importance (Chapter 7). Given that quotation grafts one speaker’s discourse into another’s, it is not only intertextual but also intersubjective; as a result, it foregrounds the intersubjectivity constitutive of what is recognizable as knowledge.
The distinction between parrots and nightingales may appear to be loaded against parrots. It is true that the early troubadours were pretty uniformly pro-nightingale, and this prejudice is perpetuated along the nightingales’ way—even if it is so, paradoxically, by poets’ unthinkingly reiterating the importance of spontaneous song! However, this book is committed to exploring and appreciating the significance of the alternate path. In line with medieval thinking about parrots, I have argued in favor of the potential creativity of the repetition with which they are associated. The avian protagonist of the Novas del papagai (Chapter 6) may seem to reiterate what the characters say to it, but equally it contrives the models that are subsequently imitated by them. Imitation and repetition lie at the heart of what we think of as “human” nature and are nowhere instantiated better than by resourceful parrots.
In line with this account of the creativity of repetition, this book elaborates a theory of quotation as a mechanism of change. By this is meant both that the repeated words take on new meaning and that the subject position they construct or suppose also changes. The first person in question might be that of the original quotation, of the one who quotes it, or of its eventual reader. The notion of change with which I am working is primarily psychoanalytic, as befits an account situated at the psychic level. Thus I identify a change as a new beginning: a new engagement of the subject with the symbolic order, and thus a renewed and potentially different relation to desire. I have theorized this process in light of Jacques Lacan’s account of the therapeutic concept of the transference. Dialogue between the analyst and analysand leads to exposing the extent to which the patient’s stance is contingently bound up with knowledge that, in reality, is only supposed and with a subjectivity that is similarly hypothetical. This insight can free the patient from his inertia and enable him to redefine himself as a desiring subject. A more accessible version of these ideas is found in Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s autobiography, L’amour des commencements, where the author speaks of the gaps and hesitations that enable a person, in their aftermath, to comprehend his situation differently or, as Pontalis puts it, to “touch a different earth.”
In order to orient the views of these psychoanalysts more toward quotation as a literary phenomenon, I articulate them together with writings on verbal repetition by Jacques Derrida. His early work on the mark that is inevitably re-marked when an utterance is repeated in a different context (as it must, by definition, be capable of being if it is an utterance) provides a way of thinking about how iteration generates symbolic instability around such concepts as “identity” and “subjectivity”; it also, as I noted, makes it difficult to distinguish quoting from other forms of copying. Derrida’s more recent contribution to postcolonial thinking again returns to the mark as tracing the illusion of the subject’s presence in, or ownership of, any particular language; the possible implications of this for Occitan are explored in Chapter 6 and for Dante in Chapter 9. Edward Saïd also situates beginnings in the literary field when he describes them as creating a parallel, essentially secular model of authority, as opposed to a hierarchical, descent-based one (such as that of Compagnon’s monographie).
The insight that quotation introduces an authority alongside that of the one who quotes chimes with the broadly parodic streak in the texts I have written about in this book, since they all situate themselves intriguingly beside rather than in the lineage of Latin. Perhaps nowhere is this more piquant than in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, which specifically promotes the vernacular, using the language and conceptual apparatus of Latin. It is most widespread, however, in the practice of quotation by incipit: a practice that goes back to the very earliest grammars, is enshrined in the ordinatio of chansonnier manuscripts, and extends as far forward as Petrarch. Incipital quotation, I have argued, is a particularly telling instance of the way quotation involves the potential for change, since quoting a text’s incipit can enable a moment of freedom in which its symbolic world can be inaugurated afresh and our relation to it can be redrawn. Even the fact of recognizing a troubadour song as having an incipit forges a connection between it and written texts in Latin, endowing what was formerly an oral courtly performance with new authority.
This constantly insinuated, oblique parallel to Latin is one of the kinds of work that troubadour quotation most consistently performs. By its means, Occitan and its poetry are “grammaticalized,” or treated as though they were a kind of neo-Latin. The tendency to grammaticalize lies behind the compilation of vernacular grammars (a contradiction in terms for the early Middle Ages) and all the various strategies that elevate the troubadours to the status of auctores, such as the production of biographies and anthologies—including, of course, the patterns of quotation and citation themselves. This construction of Occitan as an international literary standard is an instance of what Derrida calls the monolangue: the language of a prestige culture that offers the lure of a uniquely meaningful identification for the speaking subject, and thus of a formal authorization of his knowledge, independent of the value of the content of what is said.
Content is at the core of the other main form of work performed by quotation, which is, broadly speaking, justificatory: that is, the quoted words are alleged as sustaining something supposed to be known (such as a moral insight) in the supposed speaking subject, whether that is the original troubadour, the one who quotes, or the prospective reader of their words, which justifies a particular belief or behavior. This aspect of quotation is manifested in the preference for quoting sententious excerpts, with the ostensible aim, from the time of Raimon Vidal’s novas on, of bolstering the positions of those who quote them. Passages with potentially justificatory uses are assembled in florilegia; their interpretation reaches unexpected heights in the Breviari d’amor where fin’ amors becomes identified as a means by which to understand God’s essence as love; in different ways, Dante and Guilhem Molinier also integrate the work of quotation into an eschatological scheme. I have shown how these authors (except perhaps Molinier) present quotation in such a way as to expose the supposed nature of the knowledge concerned: for example, by insinuating the ineptitude of some of those who quote (Raimon Vidal), or by showing that quotations rely on any number of competing hermeneutics that are inevitably circular (Matfre Ermengau).
Such techniques provoke an interplay of recognition and misrecognition between supposed subjects and the kinds of knowledge—including knowledge of desire—that can be imputed to quotation. Quotation does not simply require a modicum of scholarly expertise, it plays with our whole relationship to knowledge, exhibiting at every turn the duplicity that Derrida identifies in iteration and that Lacan attributes to the unconscious. Thus, while quoting relies on remembering or preserving, it also depends on forgetting or suppressing. It appears to repeat the words of another but overwrites them with the views of the one who quotes. While seeming to inform, it can withhold, challenge, or confuse. Different modulations of our supposed relation to supposed knowledge are presented in each of the chapters in this book, from the challenge to see troubadour poetry as constituting the very substance of thought (Chapter 1) to the provocation to accept that the prestige of the troubadours is an arbitrary legacy of a past that is now over (Chapter 11).
The span of a century and a half that separates my first from my last chapter is marked by shifts in the kinds of knowledge associated with the troubadours, though these are not sudden or abrupt. The earliest instances of quotation by Raimon Vidal imply the existence of social groups actively interested in performing or appreciating troubadour poems, especially in Catalan courts and hence at a significant geographical remove from the songs’ birthplace in northern Occitania. Here knowledge of the troubadours involves speakers and oral memory; the sense of being still broadly contemporary with them is strong. The conviction that knowledge of the troubadours plays a vital part in a speech community persists as late as the Breviari d’amor, almost at the end of the thirteenth century. Musical performance, seemingly divorced from quotation from its earliest occurrences of quotation, is brought back later in the century when Jofre de Foixà’s imitation of northern French trouvères incorporates aspects of the nightingales’ way with that of the parrots. Considering performance in a different light, for native Italians like Bertolome Zorzi, and perhaps again for Dante, the accumulated tradition of quotation can make the whole process of quoting something of a drag act, my conception of “drag” here being guided by Judith Butler’s application to gender theory of Derrida’s work on iteration.
But the early grammatical treatises also insinuate that knowledge relies on the existence of written texts, and the various modes of quotation that follow tend to center more and more on writing and the archive (Chapters 3 and 4). The practice of commentary contributes to the masterful overreading of seemingly unremarkable troubadour passages, banally misogynist in the compiler of the anthology in H, unexpectedly theological in the Breviari d’amor. In the fourteenth-century texts analyzed from Chapter 9 onward, techniques of copying the troubadours pioneered in the early songbooks take precedence over speech, and eventually the role of memory in quotation tips in favor of forgetting. The token acts of remembering, or misremembering, performed in these later texts have the effect of consigning the troubadours to oblivion.
The net effect of these negotiations over supposed knowledge and its supposed subjects, I have contended, is to bring about changes in poetic subjectivity in which the stance of courtly fin’ amors and its postures of knowing desire give way to what is generally recognized as the rather different desiring postures of Petrarchanism and beyond. In outline, the process of change that I have proposed is that described by Lacan in the transference: a subject’s relation to desire can only be given up in favor of another via a passage through supposed knowledge. Clearly the outcome of such transformation is itself never static, so I would certainly not affirm that the result of the changes described here is a stable, individual “self” defined by its own interior space, as some views of the Renaissance would have it. Indeed, to repeat what Adrian Armstrong and I wrote in our conclusion to Knowing Poetry, “It is important to avoid reifying precisely those distinctions between ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renaisfance’ that recent reflection has shown to be difficult to sustain; nor should we hypostatize a cultural movement, the early modern Renaissance, as a historical epoch.”1
Nevertheless, as that conclusion also argues, the way verse situates itself with respect to time does shift. While I certainly would not want to claim that the practice of quotation is solely responsible for this movement, it plays a part in it and may help to capture it. When, in “Lasso me,” Petrarch both relies on troubadour quotation and seeks to end it as a practice, he provides a telling if small-scale instance of a mutation in historical consciousness. Medieval commitment to the continuous mediation of a still accessible past is in the process of being relinquished; it will be overtaken by what Thomas M. Greene calls “humanist pride and humanist despair” at the chasm that separates the scholar-poet from the remote culture of antiquity.2 The double impulse of poetry in the Petrarchan manner, imitation and quasi-divine inspiration, are responses to this perceived temporal gap that the end of the tradition of troubadour quotation has helped to create.3 Thus its Petrarchan obliteration is also the most significant moment of renewal that this tradition has enabled; in the end, the parrots’ way of transmitting the troubadours proves more productive than the nightingales’.
Thus although the practice of troubadour quotation is certainly not the only mechanism of cultural change in the period described in this book, it is a driver, beside others, of a new beginning that is to prove enduringly important. It is ironic, in the circumstances, that this practice, one of the most concerted efforts to remember the troubadours, should itself have been forgotten until now.