Marco Institute Annual Riggsby Lecture: Marisa Galvez (Stanford), "Unthinking Medieval Poetry: Troubadours & Machaut"

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The 23rd Annual Riggsby Lecture on Medieval Mediterranean History & Culture will feature Marisa Galvez (Stanford), who will speak on "Unthinking Medieval Poetry: Troubadours & Machaut."

This lecture examines how contemporary poet-translators and artists “unthink” medieval poetry through a creative translation of the conventions and forms of medieval lyric in a mode that is instinctual and sensual, yet formal and critical. By translating the verse of the troubadours and Guillaume Machaut into new media and poetic assemblages, the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos (b. 1931) and Occitanist musician-poet and Gérard Zuchetto (b. 1951) and sculptor Jean-Luc Séverac (1936-2022) return to the craft of this poetry as word and sound. Their translations allow us to encounter the ritualized performance of absence and circularity in time and space anew and in multiple modes: for instance, verse as prosody and music, and mediated by a manuscript.

Marisa Galvez is Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. She specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. Her new book, Before the Global South: Unthinking Medieval Poetry (University of Chicago Press) explores how an eclectic array of contemporary poets, artists, and writers (Augusto de Campos, Édouard Glissant, and others) reimagine medieval European lyric forms. She argues that these adaptations—what she calls “unthought medievalism”—offer a mode of inquiry that is at once scholarly, critical, and creative, a new methodology for studying intangible cultural heritages of the Global South.

Thanks to the generous support of donors Stuart and Kate Riggsby, the Marco Institute established the annual Riggsby Lecture on Medieval Mediterranean History & Culture in 2004. This lecture series brings a prestigious scholar of the medieval Mediterranean to the University of Tennessee campus every fall to give a public talk on a medieval Mediterranean topic of the speaker’s choosing.