Call for Papers – Société Guilhem IX @ ICMS (Kalamazoo)

Call for Papers for Kalamazoo from the Société Guilhem IX

1. Session of Papers: Beyond the Canso
The troubadours are known primarily for their love lyrics, which crystalized in the later twelfth century into the genre of the canso. Yet not only did this crystallization occur late, but the troubadours’ inventiveness in new genres was irrepressible. From the adaptation of such widespread genres as the May song or the dawn song, to the creation of one-offs such as the excuse song or the I-don’t-know-what-it-is, they filled the court air with their playful experiments. The Société Guilhem IX invites contributions to a panel on these other genres of troubadour lyric. Panelists might discuss a lineage of songs in a given genre, songs that cross generic boundaries, songs that seem to belong to a genre apart, the (in)adequacy of definitions of the genres given in the later medieval poetic handbooks, the link between genre and melodic composition, the theory of genres, and so on.

2. Roundtable: Thibaut de Champagne and the Troubadours
Thibaut was the heir not only to the county of Champagne and kingdom of Navarre, but also to the poetic traditions that had come to him through his grandmother Marie and great-grandmother Eleanor, patrons of letters and the arts, and through his great-great-great-grandfather, Guilhem IX, the first named troubadour whose compositions have survived. Like his troubadour ancestor, Thibaut was a lyricist, leaving behind a sophisticated body of erotic and religious songs in his own language, Champenois French. The Société Guilhem IX celebrates the magisterial new edition of Thibaut’s lyric by Christopher Callahan, Marie-Geneviève Grossel, and Daniel O’Sullivan (Éditions Honoré Champion, 2018) with a roundtable exploring links between Thibaut and the troubadours. Participants might consider poetic techniques or topoi, melodic composition, networks of patronage, song exchanges, or any other aspects of this lyric art that may be compared or linked.

Please send abstracts of 200–300 words to Mary Franklin-Brown, brow2085@umn.edu, by September 1, 2017.