Poétesses et escrivaines en Occitanie médiévale: La trace, la voix, le genre by Frédérique Le Nan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poétesses et escrivaines en Occitanie médiévale: La trace, la voix, le genre by Frédérique Le Nan Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner Le Nan, Frédérique. Poétesses et escrivaines en Occitanie médiévale: La trace, la voix, le genre. Collection Interférences. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021. 270 pages. ISBN 978-2-75-8037-4. €25. Frédérique Le Nan's study focuses on the small but remarkable group of women poets who participated in the troubadour tradition. She approaches them directly through their extant corpus but, most especially, indirectly by way of their passage through time, as she follows their traces: first, in medieval manuscripts; then, beginning with Jehan de Nostredame in the sixteenth century, through a series of historical references to some of the women's names and fictionalized lives; and finally in the scholarly assessments of their numbers and works by nineteenth and twentieth century philologists, literary historians, and medievalists whose published research and anthologies provide the foundation for Le Nan's analysis of their voices under the banner of gender studies. Inextricably entwined in le genre, questions of language and gender arise immediately in the book's title, which seems to avoid the expected trobairitz, the feminine and invariable form that corresponds to troubadour (trobaire / trobador), commonly used when Anglophone scholars refer to the women troubadours. Instead, Le Nan doubles down on the French feminine forms for poet and writer, each one carrying a different history of usage and reception. Poétesse has a long chronology behind it but is considered "vieilli" by the Robert, while Larousse agrees with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that poète is now the preferred term. In English, poetess resonates pejoratively to modern ears and writeress is definitely beyond the pale (the most recent example in the OED dates from 1855). But admittedly the gender neutral remains unavailable in French. When escrivaines follows on poétesses, Le Nan combines both an older form and a newly invented one, old-fashioned initial es replacing the modern accented é and the final feminine e reflecting a contemporary trend, as in auteure. The term proclaims Le Nan's feminist stance, though its use in this context (a medieval escrivain is the scribe who writes, not the author who invents) seems to side-step the musical character of [End Page 63] the women poets' works—with the possible exception of Azalais d'Altier's salut d'amour—as well as one of the chestnuts of the critical tradition: did troubadours (and trobairitz by extension) compose as well as perform orally, or at what point were their songs written down by composers themselves and then recorded in the chansonniers by editors and anthologizers? In the text, Le Nan uses trobairitz along with other appropriate terms, but her diffidence in the title may have been occasioned by Pierre Bec's claim, which she repeats several times, that the word was never used in the Middle Ages to designate the women poets, appearing only once in the romance Flamenca to describe the verbal cleverness of two women servants. That claim has been debunked by Elizabeth W. Poe in a meticulously researched article, "Cantairitz e Trobairitz: A Forgotten Attestation of Old Provençal 'Trobairitz.'" The term appears several times in Terramagnino da Pisa's grammatical treatise Doctrina d'Acort (between 1282–1296) and clearly refers to the women troubadours. Moreover, "this non-native speaker whose acquaintance with Provençal was sketchy and bookish, would have been reluctant to invent examples that he had never seen before" (207), which leads Poe to conclude that he must have seen earlier uses of the feminine form. She also points out that both Oskar Schultz-Gora's 1888 anthology of the trobairitz and Joseph Anglade's Histoire sommaire de la littérature méridionale du Moyen-Âge (1921) made the term available for modern readers. A brief introduction outlines the emergence of women troubadours as a textual ensemble and defines gender studies to include the intersectionality of social and political dimensions. Le Nan then divides her study into five chapters, clearly organized and announced by a series of subtitles that guide the reader from...