The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance

The Death of the Troubadour offers new insight into the emergence of the autonomous "self," which has often been taken as a marker of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Gregory B. Stone argues that the anonymity of late medieval texts, and specifically of the troubadour song, is not a sign of naïveté but rather that of a mature, deliberate resistance to the advent of individualism. Moreover, this anonymity reveals that medieval lyric, with a melancholy knowledg...