Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry by Sarah Kay (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry by Sarah Kay Rebecca Hill Sarah Kay, Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry ( Philadelpha: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) 400 pp. In her latest study, Sarah Kay weaves together a qualitative and quantitative analysis of citations in troubadour poetry from Occitan as it occurs in other vernacular poetry of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. She defines the titular theme, embodied by figures of the parrot and the nightingale, as the importance of quotation alongside mimicry in the development of poetry on the European continent. The parrot, parodized in Ovidian and Marcabruan literature, seems capable of little poetic efficacy, particularly where love is concerned. In contrast, nightingale’s prestige dominated the twelfth century’s bent toward imitatio. While the virtues of the nightingale have become emblematic of the vernacular lyric project, Kay hopes to “restore to visibility the phenomenon of troubadour quotation and to study it as a whole.” Pointing to research conducted regarding Romance (such as Boulton’s Song in the Story), Kay identifies a need to explore the implications of parroting rather than improvising, especially since she estimates that twenty-five percent of troubadour poetry is quoted within a few generations of composition. Although many specialists in medieval poetry will be familiar with Dante Alighieri’s insertions of Arnaut Daniel, Kay adds many more names to the trove of vernacular quotation source material circa and before the Divina commedia along the Mediterranean coast. As the first study of its kind and breadth, indeed, Kay’s work is comprehensive and latent with the possibility for much expansion. Kay asserts that the parrot has several less obvious merits and that it has been an enduring trope in literature since antiquity, particularly in the centro genre. Generated at the intersection of twelfth-century scholasticism and fin’ amour, troubadour [End Page 253] poetry, when cited, can serve as an “engine of change” as well as exhibit “desire for knowledge” (2), according to the author. Rather than emphasizing the violence or divorced origins of the method, as other scholars have, Kay chooses to focus on the fecundity of quotations, “like seeds from which a new, secular and lay poetry can grow” (11). Throughout her book, Kay impresses upon the reader that quotations served to elevate poetry—in particular, vernacular poetry—to the level of authority and incited the reading audience to conceptualize the corpus of troubadour poetry as an archive of coveted knowledge, which was worthy of study, internalization and reworking. Occasionally, Kay massages this thesis with insights from Derrida and Lacan to illustrate the ever-complicated difference between lyric, with its aspiration toward a “national culture,” and quotation, which is “exiled, diasporic, and cosmopolitan” (14), but even without a theoretical framework, her astute readings stand on their own. Kay defines her criteria for identifying citation with scientific specificity and simplicity: at least one full line—which is as much as one can hope for with respect to a genre that has been categorized and compartmentalized since Raimon Vidal de Besalu’s Razos de trobar, a late-twelfth-century treatise on poetics. In the first chapter of the book, “Rhyme and Reason: Quotation in Raimon Vidal de Besalu Razos de trobar and the Grammars of the Vidal Tradition,” which also opens the first of three sections entitled “Pioneering Troubadour Quotation,” Kay points out an important distinction between French and Occitan grammars: whereas the authors of French grammars had a more commercial aim in mind when writing about language usage, Occitan authors, such as Ramon Vidal (1196–1252), wished to enhance and disseminate the poetic power of language. Not at all shy in his endeavor, in preamble to his Razos, Raimon states “trobars et chantars son movemenz de totas galliardias” [translated by Kay as “compositions and song are what move all exception bravery”] (29). He goes on to explain that the alchemical union of adjective and substance in trobar poems are conducive to rational thought. Similarly, Jofre de Foixa (d. 1300) draws upon the grammatical breakdown found in Latin treatises; he separates all nominal forms into objects and accidents. However, it is Raimon who ushers in two...