Medieval Oral Literature, ed. Karl Reichl, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2011.
ISBN 978-3-11-018934-6, 743 pp., 159,95 euro; also available as e-book
In her book Oral Poetry published in 1977, Ruth Finnegan notes that oral poetry ‘is not an odd or aberrant phenomenon in human culture’, but ‘is of common occurrence in human society, literate as well as non-literate’. She explicitly mentions medieval European poetry in her list of oral poetry past and present. With the appearance of Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales in 1960 a new chapter in the debate on the orality of medieval poetry, in particular epic poetry, was opened. Lord’s analyses put the study of medieval oral literature on a new footing. Today the scholarly debate on medieval oral literature has reached a stage in wich the extremes of earlier views have been discarded and a synthesis that does justice to the many-facetted interplay of orality and literacy in the Middles Ages is possibile.
The book Medieval Oral Poetry attempts such a synthesis. It is intended to reflect the current state of affairs in a comprehensive survey, written by an international team of twenty-five scholars and offers a thorough discussion of theoretical approaches as well as detailed presentations of individual traditions and genres. The contributors are J. M. Foley with P. Ramey (Oral Theory), M. Richter (Early Middle Ages), K. O’Brien O’Keefe (Anglo-Saxon England), J. Harris (Performance: Early Middle Ages; Older Germanic Poetry), T. A. DuBois (Oral Poetics), P. Roilos (Ritual and Performance), J. F. Nagy (Medieval Ireland), J.-D. Müller (Medieval German Literature), A. Putter (Middle English Romance), D. Boutet (Chansons de geste), R. Morabito (Italian Cantari), M. H. Beissinger (Romanian Oral Epics), R. Wright (Hispanic Epic and Ballad), T. Pettit (Late-Medieval Ballad; Drama), E. Jeffreys (Medieval Greek Epic Poetry), S. N. Azbelev (Medieval Russian Oral Epics), E. Yassif (Orality and Hebrew Literature), A. L. Klinck (Woman’s Songs), K. Boklund-Lagopoulou (Middle English Lyrics), L. Spetia (The Pastourelle), J. T. Monroe (Andalusian Arabic Strophic Poetry), T. Herzog (Arabic Epic Storytelling), J. Rubanovich (Orality in Medieval Persian Literature), K. Reichl (Introduction; Performance: Later Middle Ages; Medieval Turkish Epic and Romance).