Making sung or recited verse that claimed to be extemporaneous served―for both the French trouvère songmaker and the Arabic shā‘ir (poet) of the 12th century―as a way to inhabit the position of a speaking subject who is rooted in and reactive to the sensory and affective textures of the immediate environment. But even as these songs and poems declare themselves to be absolutely of the present, they may ask their audiences to imagine other temporalities: in the case of the trouvère, a hypothetical future in which the lady might respond positively to his bid for love (“if X happens, you should/must do Y”), and in the case of the shā‘ir, an alternative world governed by the logic “if X were to happen, you would do Y.”

In this talk, Drs Betty Rosen and Geneviève Young draw on their work as Postdoctoral Researchers on King's UKRI-funded MUSLIVE project to present a comparative perspective on the “spontaneous” making of sung/recited medieval verse. What, they ask, are the affordances of considering “extemporised”trouvère song and Arabic shi‘r in light of the complex temporalities that they in fact require audiences to inhabit? And how is the work done by such claims of extemporaneity transformed when such songs and poems are transmitted in written form?

About the speakers

Dr Betty Rosen is a postdoctoral researcher on Professor Emma Dillon's UKRI-funded Musical Lives project. Her doctoral dissertation, Language Marvels: Al-Badī' In and Beyond Arabic-Islamic Poetics, argued for a renewed, translinguistic and confessional consideration of the conceptual, affective, and creative work done by a key term associated with Arabic and Islamic aesthetics and poetics (al-badī'), with particular focus on Mamluk Egypt (1250-1517). Her academic interest in the embodied immediacy and synesthetic richness of poetic performance are intimately connected to her identity as both a creative writer and a violist from a family of musicians.

Dr Geneviève Young is a postdoctoral researcher on Professor Emma Dillon's UKRI-funded Musical Lives project. She recently completed a PhD in French at Cambridge which focused on the Old French and Old Occitan epic poems, called chansons de geste. She has lived, worked, and studied in Canada, the United States, France, and the UK, and has a keen interest in time, space, and how literature structures (or unmakes) national identities.