Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French

Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs.

Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncont...