The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre.

Author/Editor
Matthews, Ricardo.

Title
The Overheard Song: Medieval Lyric in the Mixed Genre.

Published
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Irvine, 2016. Open access at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2cz1v5sv (accessed February 2, 2023).

Review
From Matthews' abstract: "This dissertation examines a medieval genre that combines narration, in prose or verse, with inserted lyrical poems. . . . [a] 'mixed genre,' whether as a prosimetrum or its all verse variation. . . . [W]ithin the mixed genre, narrative frames surround. . . , song as a locus of subjectivity. . . , [and] I am interested in the form’s capacity to suggest, or even stage, the impression of a singular, emotional subject in a variety of works: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the Tristan en prose, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Charles of Orleans’ two books, one in French and the other English, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet." Matthews' discussion of CA (pp.154-210) centers on Gower's "ongoing engagement" (156) with French forms, particularly instances where tensions and clashes recur, whether it be the "mixture" (162) of love with politics, shifts in stylistic registers, the use of "unharmonious and discordant" (176) complaints where we might otherwise find "elegant" dits amoureux, or the disjunction between Amans'/Gower's old age and the enterprise of love which makes "the songs he sings . . . naturally discordant"—"songs ill-suited to the poem’s meter" (177), songs which, paradoxically, "reveal an embattled poet, unknown even to himself, inappropriately expecting success in love where none can be" (184). Reading Gower's Traité for its tensions between ballade form and sober subject matter, Matthews argues further that "the Traitié and the Confessio Amantis form a continuous unity around the kind of poetic identity that the dits amoureux adopt, a poetics of persona that is . . . multiplicitous," (203), a "tangle of perspectives" resulting in a work that is "so unique" that "[u]nlike other prosimetra or mixed verse dits," it "concludes with no true authorial figure emerging from the work." Instead, "[s]ubjectivity becomes submerged into questions of genre—amorous, didactic, political, philosophical—with neither ceding ground to the other" (210). [MA]

Date
2016

Gower Subjects
Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Traité pour Essampler les Amants Marietz
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations