ELH

i. romantic troubadourism and european scholarship

A transnational phenomenon from the outset, scholarship on Old Occitan literature and culture began in Renaissance Italy, when Pietro Bembo defined the language as the common source of all other Romance tongues, a notion that reinforced that of troubadour verse as the foundation of vernacular European poetry.¹⁶ These ideas continued to circulate widely among scholars: in A Short View of Tragedy (1693) Thomas Rymer declared that "Provencial was the first, of the modern languages, that yielded and chim'd in with the [End Page 356] musick and sweetness of ryme."¹⁷ This concise assessment throws into relief some core features of troubadour discourse: its imbrication of ancient and modern; its association with refinement and polite literature rather than Gothick barbarism; its status as a form of modernity-in-antiquity and, in turn, its relation to modernity-as-process. Such views became commonplace in the eighteenth century—witness Louis de Jaucourt's statement, in the Encyclopédie méthodique (1786), that "toute notre Poésie moderne vient des provençaux" [all our modern poetry comes from the Provençals]—yet were also seen as a manifestation of French cultural arrogance and contested by the scholars of other nations.¹⁸ However, the troubadours' foundational status was not exclusively mired in questions of national precedence, since eighteenth-century studies continued to promote transnational cultural examinations that laid the ground for later, Romantic-period investigations.

This approach informs a key text in British troubadour discourse: Susanna Dobson's translation of the Histoire littéraire des troubadours (1774), a ground-breaking work based on materials collected by Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye (the revered author of Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie, 1759) and, after his death, edited and prepared for publication by the Abbé Claude François Xavier Millot.¹⁹ Titled The Literary History of the Troubadours and published in 1779, Dobson's translation is prefaced by an essay that portrays the early medieval poets as long forgotten figures rescued by Sainte-Palaye's indefatigable archival work, and proclaims their relevance as "the fathers of modern literature."²⁰ Rescuing them from oblivion means rediscovering a crucial, missing piece of the "literary history of Europe, and of France in particular."²¹ Interestingly, Dobson gives pre-eminence to the collective and transnational (Europe), leaving the national (France) in second place, and then widens her focus by evoking other original geocultural scenes of poetic inspiration such as the "uncultivated mountains of Scotland, the forests of America, and the frozen deserts of Lapland."²² Connecting origins and antiquity with modernity, but unlike undeveloped regions, Provence and the troubadours mark the new beginning of Western Europe's civilization after a long era of darkness, a process made possible by their rich and melodious language: "Dispersed through most of the courts of Europe, they created a relish for their compositions, and gave a celebrity to their language, almost as great as the best modern productions have given to our own."²³ Through these and other related arguments, Dobson's preface [End Page 357] paves the way for Romantic-period engagements with troubadour heritage by conjuring up a scene of modernity bound up with the ancestral and the transnational.

Troubadour poetry marked the start of postclassical European literary history as intrinsically transcultural. Occitan poems and melodies spread from the South of France to Eastern Spain (Catalonia, Valencia) then Castille and beyond, Northern Italy, Sicily, the Latin kingdoms in the Holy Land, and Germany, becoming "the common property of the continent" and "converting European literature from a merely geographical marker into the designation of coherent forms and themes."²⁴ Since its diffusion resulted in an early medieval shared linguistic-literary zone, Romantic-period investigations of troubadour poetry constituted a Europe-wide conversation. In De l'Allemagne (Of Germany, 1813) Madame de Staël ascribed to the troubadours the origins of post-classical ("romantic") poetry: "Le nom de romantique a été introduit nouvellement en Allemagne pour désigner la poésie dont les chants des troubadours ont été l'origine" [The name romantic was newly introduced in Germany to designate the poetry originating from the songs of the troubadours].²⁵ She also defended her Coppet acolytes Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel from accusations of not doing justice to French literature by declaring: "il n'en est point d'écrivains qui aient parlé avec plus d'enthousiasme du génie de nos troubadours" [there are no writers who have spoken with more enthusiasm of the genius of our troubadours].²⁶ In the third series of his public Berlin Vorlesungen (1803–4), August Wilhelm dedicated an entire lecture to the Provençal lyric, presenting it as "the mother of all modern poetry and versification."²⁷ He returned to this topic in his review of François Juste Marie Raynouard's landmark Choix de poésies originales des troubadours (Selection of Original Poetry of the Troubadours, 1816–21). Published in Paris in 1818, the review was translated by Blackwood's Magazine in a lengthy excerpt where troubadour verse is characterized by an "almost fantastic originality," "very ingenious art," and "a complicated system of versification, a variety and a copiousness in the use of rhymes, which have not been equalled in any modern tongue."²⁸ Aptly, Schlegel's superlative, often hyperbolic, assessments corroborate the outstanding status and relevance attributed to troubadour poetry and civilization among Romantic-period commentators and writers around Europe. [End Page 358]

Making reliable texts available for the first time, Raynouard's collection placed Provençal scholarship and troubadour discourse on a new, philologically sound, footing. Yet, for chronological reasons, two of the most influential literary histories of these years could not benefit from it. One was Pierre-Louis Ginguené's Histoire littéraire d'Italie, the first six volumes of which were published between 1811 and 1813, and whose opening volume features a lengthy examination of Provençal poetry, stressing repeatedly the concept of "nos Troubadours" [our troubadours] from "le midi de la France" [the South of France], a nation-centered formulation already seen in Madame de Staël. Also J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi's 1813 De la littérature du midi de l'Europe (Of the Literature of the South of Europe) drew upon earlier and less solid sources than Raynouard, but still provided an extensive treatment of the troubadours as the fountainheads of European literature, in accordance with the so-called Hispano-Arab interpretation, which reinforced the transcultural nature of Provençal poetry by linking its innovative use of rhyme and theme of courtly love to Arab poetry imported from Spain.²⁹ This transcultural traffic, Sismondi notes, generated "la poésie, qui, dans toute la Provence et tout le midi de l'Europe, brilla en même temps, comme si une étincelle électrique avait, au milieu des plus épaisses ténèbres, allumé partout à la fois des flammes éclatantes" [poetry, which, throughout Provence and the south of Europe, shone simultaneously, as if, in the midst of the thickest darkness, an electric spark had lit dazzling flames everywhere at once].³⁰

Raynouard's work inspired further re-evaluations of troubadour culture in Henri-Pascal de Rochegude's Parnasse occitanien and Essai d'un glossaire occitanien (1819) and Claude Fauriel's inauguration of his chair in littérature étrangere at the Sorbonne in 1830 with a course on the history of Provençal poetry (published as Histoire de la poésie provençale, 1846). By this time, however, the philological baton had passed on to German-language scholars. On Goethe's advice and following Raynouard's pioneering example, Friedrich Diez published two standard-setting studies: Die Poesie der Troubadours (The Poetry of the Troubadours, 1826) and Leben und Werke der Troubadours (Lives and Works of the Troubadours, 1829). Since Romantic trans-nationalism was unavoidably tangled up with national aspirations, German scholars developed, in John Haines's words, a "veritable cottage industry of Old Occitan studies," a process of "literary appropriation" endorsing a "claim to nationalistic superiority" [End Page 359] eventually sealed by Karl Bartsch's first philological edition of a troubadour, the Toulousain Peire Vidal, in 1857.³¹

Britain's antiquarians did not actively contribute to this process of rediscovery, though it is important to remember that the first troubadour melody transcribed in its original notation—Gaucelm Faidit's lament for the death of King Richard I the Lionhearted—appeared in Charles Burney's General History of Music (1782).³² In general, British scholars and writers tended to translate and rework foreign sources, and a cursory examination of periodicals between the mid-1770s and the 1830s testifies to an irregular but uninterrupted outpouring of troubadour-themed essays, reviews, prose narratives, and poetic compositions in dialogue with continental publications. In December 1774, the Monthly Review carried a long piece on the still untranslated Histoire littéraire of Sainte-Palaye and Millot emphasizing the medieval poets' regeneration of literature "when Europe was sunk in ignorance and barbarism."³³ Later, the New Annual Register for 1780 featured a substantial excerpt from Dobson's 1779 abridged translation, containing a definition of troubadour, an illustration of the Provençal language (as "Dryden confesses … the most polished of all the modern languages"), a list of the main poets, and an anecdote on Peire Vidal titled "Vidal's Tale of the Jongleur."³⁴

Troubadour discourse gradually went from sporadic interventions in the 1780s and 1790s to more substantial and frequent ones in the 1820s, with a concurrent increase of reliable research based on rediscovered manuscript sources and new interpretations and theorizations. A representative instance of early treatments appears in the Westminster Magazine for September 1779, which reproduces a section from William Russell's The History of Modern Europe (1779) ascribing the origins of romance to the troubadours "or Minstrels of Provence," who "seem to have been the lineal successors of the Celtic bards" and during the crusades "followed in crowds to the Holy Land the Princes and Nobles by whom they were patronised."³⁵ Tellingly, Russell's association of Occitan poets and Celtic bards, not uncommon at the time, sets into high relief the translatability of the troubadour, akin to the bard's and minstrel's, and located on the geocultural borders of East and West. Only later, between the 1810s and 1820s, periodicals began to feature more strictly evidence-based essays rehearsing new findings in troubadour studies, as in the translation of Schlegel's review in Blackwood's Magazine for December 1818. Shifting from broadly informative [End Page 360] to more philologically grounded contributions aimed at erudite readers, from the 1820s onward periodicals published overviews summarizing earlier research and introducing recent discoveries. These essays referenced classic works like Sainte-Palaye's and Millot's Histoire littéraire, Sismondi's De la littérature, and Ginguené's Histoire littéraire, as well as drawing extensively on Raynouard's Choix. The New Monthly Magazine mixed introductory and specialist information in "The Poetry of the Troubadours" (March 1821) and "On the Troubadours" (April 1823); whereas in September 1825 the Edinburgh Magazine provided a more decidedly learned treatment in "Notices of Authorities upon Provençal Literature, and on Provençal Romance," a wide-ranging survey covering Thomas Warton, Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, Antoni de Bastero, Juan Andrés, Sainte-Palaye and Millot, Ginguené, Sismondi, Johann Joseph von Görres, and Raynouard as the author of the richest and most scientifically solid work on the topic.

In fiction, periodicals offered translations and re-elaborations of original texts, such as "Vidal's Tale of the Jongleur" cited above, which in turn stimulated reinventions of troubadour themes in prose and verse. Instances of these original sources are the lyric "The Troubadour: Bernard de Ventadour to Agnes de Montluçon. From the Old Provençal," signed "J. Lawrence" (a resident of Weimar), in The Poetical Register for 1804; the tale of Guilhem de Cabestany's tragic love for the wife of a vindictive nobleman in the January 1807 Gentleman's Magazine; and the account of Jaufré Rudel (anglicized as "Jeffrey Rudell"), his love for the Countess of Tripoli, and his hallmark theme of amor de lonh [love from afar] in the Theatrical Inquisitor for January 1813.³⁶ Further sources for original prose and verse were the essays on the "courts of love" and the poetic competition of the "Floral Games" in Toulouse and their legendary founder, the countess Clémence Isaure, the protagonist of Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poem The Golden Violet (1827).³⁷ Troubadour-inspired narrative and lyrical compositions appeared in collections of verse and periodicals, as in Felicia Hemans's "The Song of the Troubadour to Richard Coeur de Lion" from Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse (1819), and her shorter "Troubadour Songs" ("The Warrior crossed" and "They rear'd no trophies") and "Troubadour Song" ("The Captive Knight") published in the New Monthly Magazine for August and September 1824. Besides Landon's Golden Violet, more substantial treatments in verse included her [End Page 361] metrical romance The Troubadour (1825) and Eleanor Ann Porden's epic "Coeur de Lion;" or, the Third Crusade (1822).

As with shorter offerings like Hemans's lyrics, these lengthy annotated poems portray the troubadour as a border-crossing figure, a literary and geographical wanderer. In line with the pan-European scholarship they draw upon, they challenge appropriative strategies seeking to ascribe this figure to one national culture (as in Madame de Staël's phrase "nos troubadours") and question the idea of an exclusively national literary voice, making it partly coincide with and partly differ from other Romantic figures of bardic performance. Therefore, just as continental studies on the troubadours repeatedly highlight their European significance, Romantic-era troubadour discourse in Britain values and explores the transcultural and incipiently transnational nature of the phenomenon. And, far from coincidentally, as this quick survey indicates, interest in Old Occitan literature and culture deepened in the Napoleonic aftermath, when Europe's political and economic conditions became again an object of concern, and more particularly gained prominence in Scott's geopolitical and literary-cultural vision of the continent.

ii. post-napoleonic europe and scott's troubadour imagination

From his youthful passion for romance and Renaissance epic to his unfinished Siege of Malta (1831–2), Scott's literary imagination inhabited local-national and foreign-transnational spaces simultaneously, engendering fiction that, in McCracken-Flesher's perceptive phrasing, "preemptively deconstructs the restrictive terms on which readers of narrative and nation often rely" and "foregrounds meaning as the indeterminate result of constant movement."³⁸ The interrelation between Scott's continental and European concerns and his writing of the nation has recently attracted a fair amount of critical attention from, among others, Fiona Robertson, Robert Crawford, Michael Simpson, and Patrick Thomas Henry.³⁹ In a sophisticated reading of Waverley's European subtext, Simpson anchors the novel to a post-Napoleonic "multilateral effort to reconstruct Europe" and a geopolitical space where "nation and empire are stressfully triangulated with Continent so that neither can be directly described as the other."⁴⁰ In addition, his focus on Scott's first novel illuminates the presence of Europe in other works from this early phase—Guy Mannering (1815), The [End Page 362] Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and Ivanhoe (1819) come readily to mind—flagging transnational perspectives that grow increasingly visible in the 1820s, when the novelist engages more and more robustly with Europe as a historical-political tangle transitioning from feudalism to the early modern age, and from revolutionary emergency to the Napoleonic aftermath.

As Simpson's reading intimates, the turn to Europe in Quentin Durward, The Talisman, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris (1831), or The Siege of Malta is not a late, opportunistic move dictated by creative exhaustion and financial needs. Concentrating on France in Quentin Durward and Count Robert, Crawford defines Scott's turn "an imaginative re-engagement with the Continent … which reminded his fellow islanders of the larger map of European relations, and which complicated short-term views in a way that was, ultimately, reconciling and re-engaging."⁴¹ If Crawford's emphasis on re-engagement aptly fits the post-Napoleonic frame, that of "sympathetic reconciliation" is a less straightforward matter, since Scott explores interconnections and co-dependence but also consistently foregrounds gaps and dissonances.⁴² For, as Robertson notes, his European output addresses issues "analogous to those which exercised European leaders in debating the two treaties of Paris in 1814 and 1815, and throughout the Congresses of major powers which took place between 1814 and 1822."⁴³ These issues, Robertson specifies, are "the nature and value of monarchy, the place of ideology in practical politics, the wisdom of intervention in the affairs of other states, and the balance of power within, and between, nations."⁴⁴ Pervading Scott's vision of a "rapidly changing European framework," such concerns suggest a route for reappraising how The Talisman and Anne of Geierstein, and their treatments of the troubadour theme, deal with the continent as a political-historical and literary-cultural mesh against the backdrop of the Congress system and the "concert" of Europe sanctioned at Vienna.⁴⁵

In his letters from 1815 and well into the post-Napoleonic years, Scott frequently manifested his fear that continental powers would "again draw the sword for petty and individual interest" and doubts that the Vienna settlement could ensure "the tranquillity of Europe."⁴⁶ He found similar apprehensions in a treatise titled The Congress of Vienna (1816) by the abbé Dominique Dufour de Pradt, a Napoleonic clergyman-diplomat turned pro-Bourbon and a prolific author of historical and geopolitical works. The [End Page 363] abbé defines 1815 as "the commencement of a prolonged scene of repose" for a continent held together by "general interests," a shared "political constitution," a "whole body," "general balance," and a "general arrangement."⁴⁷ But his picture grows gloomier and less homogeneous as his analysis progresses. Comparing the outcomes of Vienna with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that concluded the Thirty Years' War and fixed Europe's eighteenth-century balance of power, he finds the latter obsolete since the continent "is no longer that Europe that it was when ten years were spent in negotiations at Munster and Osnaburg," while the decrees of the former fall dramatically short of ensuring continental stability.⁴⁸ In turn, De Pradt charges the Congress of Vienna with countless wrong decisions and depicts the post-Napoleonic continent as perilously squeezed between the "two domineering masses of power" of Britain and Russia and beset by a financial crisis that "inspires terror."⁴⁹ Scott could agree with much in this picture, as he repeatedly weighed "the grand military dance which all Europe performd in" during the French wars and the less than reassuring state of Britain and the continent after the Vienna agreements.⁵⁰

Scott's monitoring of Europe from jointly historical, geopolitical, and personal perspectives is in full view in a letter of 1 November 1822 to his son Walter, then a lieutenant of the 15th Regiment of the King's Hussars, stationed in Dresden. The Germanophile and European-minded father advises him to persevere with German, "the language of war," to study Napoleon's "last campaign in Germany" in "good German accounts of these remarkable events," but also because "we [the British] seldom act but in conjunction with some of the continental powers."⁵¹ He also cites the Congress of Verona (9–14 October 1822), to which "all eyes now are turnd … for peace or war but the former is almost certain," because "the continental powers have no money … and John Bull the common paymaster has God knows none to give them."⁵² Coinciding with De Pradt's catastrophic picture of post-Napoleonic economics, Scott's remark is also deeply personal: owing to the "embarrasd" state of Britain's economy, "[t]he poor have plenty & are better off than ever they were in my time."⁵³ The lower orders were undoubtedly the worst affected by the postwar economic downturn, yet landowners, whose profit margins shrank, also characterized themselves as impoverished, and demanded what Scott, who was directly affected by these conditions, calls measures "to render the state of the better classes more comfortable."⁵⁴ [End Page 364]

This theme resurfaces in the introduction to Quentin Durward—started in November 1822, at the time of the letter to Walter—making visible the tight link between Scott's European-themed fictions and his vision of post-Napoleonic Europe as an interlocking of geopolitical, historical, economic, and literary-cultural components. In the introduction to the novel's first edition, the Tory Scots narrator/transcriber is temporarily residing in France owing to "the distresses which at present afflict the moneyed and landed interest" in Britain, and styles himself one of "the tribe which are ruined by peace and plenty."⁵⁵ While centering on the late fifteenth-century attritions between Burgundy and France, the tale he weaves from materials in the library of the Marquis of Hautlieu's dilapidated château also relates to post-Napoleonic Europe and "these realms" of Scotland and England.⁵⁶ Accordingly, the novel treats "a part of French history … most important to that of Europe at large" in a fifteenth- and a nineteenth-century frame simultaneously, a conjunction Scott emphasizes also in the introduction to the Magnum Opus edition by expatiating on the demise of feudalism and the resultant "extraordinary commotions" unsettling "all Europe."⁵⁷ A tale of late-medieval troubles for the troubled 1820s, Quentin Durward illuminates his other Europeanthemed fictions from this decade by highlighting the connections between national and transnational geopolitics, and Britain and the continent, as well as the role of fiction in investigating a "rapidly changing European framework."

Since, as Crawford notes, France crystallizes Scott's post-Napoleonic attention to "Europe and the relations between his country and the European powers," it is not coincidental that his concern with the (Southern "French") troubadours flourishes at the same time, adding a literary-cultural edge to his historical-political musings.⁵⁸ The novelist's 1820s investments in the troubadour theme resonate with his envisioning the nation as "an energetic process to which there is no location and no end," in McCracken-Flesher's words, a process complicated further by the continent's transnational continuities and divergences.⁵⁹

In Scott's output, references to the troubadours appear in the essays on chivalry (1818), drama (1819), and romance (1824) he wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica. In "Chivalry" he mentions Sainte-Palaye's and Millot's Histoire littéraire, which, however, curiously does not feature in the catalogue of his library at Abbotsford.⁶⁰ In "Romance" he draws the following picture of medieval literary [End Page 365] border-crossings: "[t]he country of Germany, lying contiguous to France, and constantly engaged in friendly and hostile intercourse with that great seat of romantic fiction, became, of course, an early partaker in the stores which it afforded," adding that "[t]he minnesingers of the Holy Empire were a race no less cherished than the troubadours of Provence, or the minstrels of Normandy."⁶¹ In "Drama" he alludes to this panorama of contacts and transitions by touching upon the role of "travelling minstrels and troubadours" as among the earliest cultural disseminators in postclassical Europe.⁶² And in Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) Scott conjures up the troubadour as a foundational figure of Europe's poetic modernity, yet one also linked to contemporaneity. In this semi-fictional account of his experiences in post-Napoleonic Belgium and France, he mines the capacity of troubadour discourse to bring into view past and present, poetry and geopolitics, on the field of Waterloo, positing the medieval poets as bound up with the battlefield itself—literally with its soil.

After visiting the site, in one of the neighboring hamlets the protagonist secures a "relique" of high "moral interest" from "a lady, whose father had found it upon the field of battle," an object he describes as follows: "a manuscript collection of French songs, bearing stains of clay and blood, which probably indicate the fate of the proprietor. One or two of these romances I thought pretty … The tone of these two romances chimes in not unhappily with the circumstances in which the manuscript was found."⁶³ In other words, Paul obtains a fragment of the decisive battle for the fate of Europe, a "relique" of this site of the continent's present (and future); and the manuscript is a relic both in the sense of a sacred object and that of a remainder of the past that represents continuity and, in Ina Ferris' definition of the Scottian remnant, "disconnection from present energies" and "the noncontemporaneity of the contemporaneous."⁶⁴

Caked with the mud and blood of the climax in "the war by which the fate of Europe was to be decided," this book-within-the-book blends the historical-political and the literary-cultural sides of the European continuum.⁶⁵ Tellingly, the two songs Paul transcribes in translation are troubadour-inspired compositions—"Romance of Dunois" and "The Troubadour"—described as "pretty" instances of the mode troubadour.⁶⁶ The narrator presents his purchase as an ordinary action in a place where locals thrive on a tourist-oriented souvenir industry not dissimilar from the contemporary production [End Page 366] and consumption of medievalizing literary-musical fare. Thus he remarks that, had these compositions been "reliques of minstrelsy," they would have conjured up "gay visions of knights and squires and troubadours, and sirventes and lais, and courts of Love and usages of antique chivalry;" instead, being from "our own times," they read like "the stock in trade of the master of a regimental band" or "the pastime of some young and gay French officer."⁶⁷ Still, by interweaving different temporalities, this dismissal reinforces the link between troubadour originals and mode troubadour, chivalry and modern warfare, the originary scenes of medieval Europe and those of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic continent. In Paul's words, the two poems make literary representation a tightly packed nexus of temporal, cultural, historical, and geopolitical components. The weight of the present and the modern is encapsulated in the decisive battle of the age; the past chimes with it in the two songs; and orality (the song), print (Scott's book), and manuscript constitute a potted history of mediation. Just as the contemporary soldier doubles as a medieval poet-warrior, an ancient literary past materializes in a manuscript that is both a Waterloo and a post-Waterloo object. Indeed, Paul's found manuscript contains Europe by referencing the battle explicitly and the subsequent continental Restoration implicitly, while also looking back to the birthplace of postclassical poetry. It powerfully reveals how Scott employs the troubadour as a device to make different dimensions—past and present, earliness and lateness, the nation and the transnational—coincide and interact within his multifaceted (historical, geopolitical, literary-cultural) focus on the 1820s continent.

iii. scott's troubadours, 1825–29

In The Talisman and Anne of Geierstein Scott places troubadour discourse within networks of incipiently transnational history and cultural exchanges, and, as in Paul's Letters, makes it a decisive component in the development of European civilization. Their narratives depict different settings and periods: The Talisman is set in the Holy Land near the end of the third crusade (1189–92) sparked off by Saladin's conquest of large portions of Palestine, including Jerusalem, in 1187; whereas Anne of Geierstein is set in the territories of Switzerland, Burgundy, and Provence shortly after the Battle of Tewksbury (1471). Thus, their treatments of the troubadour move chronologically from burgeoning in The Talisman to decadence [End Page 367] in Anne of Geierstein. Moreover, the Scottish and English theme is central to both novels: in The Talisman Richard the Lionheart and Sir Kenneth, the heir to the Scottish throne, keep Britain's history and geography in the limelight; in Anne of Geierstein, John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford, and Margaret of Anjou link the plot to England and the War of the Roses. But Scott makes these national figures and events inextricable from a European context represented by the Christian army in The Talisman and, in Anne of Geierstein, by the fact that Europe's geohistorical pivot is in a swathe of lands including the Kingdom of France, the Duchy of Burgundy, the County of Provence, and the Swiss cantons. The troubadour provides an additional, and far from secondary, feature in these novels' representations of Europe as a map of mobile and permeable literary-cultural and geopolitical lines and borders.

The Talisman emphatically questions demarcations through the challenges posed by the Muslim other, which reconfigure seemingly discrete categories and reveal the rifts in the crusaders' front. Two crucial moments revolve around this process. The first is the opening fight between Kenneth and Sheerkohf/Saladin in the desert near the well by the Dead Sea. At the start, the East-West boundary is neatly delineated by the space between them ("the distance of an hundred yards"), which they cross and re-cross during their highly choreographic clash. Addressing Sir Kenneth, Sheerkohf repeats the locative betwixt ("There is truce betwixt our nations … wherefore should there be war betwixt thee and me?—Let there be peace betwixt us"), as he speaks in the lingua franca "used for the purpose of communication with the crusaders."⁶⁸ Progressively, their separate realities converge until the narrator acknowledges that chivalry "had extended itself gradually from the Christians to their mortal enemies the Saracens, both of Spain and of Palestine" (T, 9), the earliest mention in the novel of Islamic Iberia as a hybridized culture. Boundaries are established and blurred, opposites confront each other and blend. The second moment, when the Archduke of Austria removes the banner of England on St. George's Mount, dramatizes the divisions in the apparently cohesive Western army. The offense provokes the English warriors' "national invocation, 'Saint George for Merry England!'" (T, 111) and the scene that follows depicts "men of all the various nations assembled, where, perhaps, every people in Christendom had their representatives" (T, 111), a mass of soldiers "assembled together, to witness the end of these extraordinary [End Page 368] proceedings" (T, 112). In fact, this terminology of unity points up fractures and tensions, and the outcome is that "antipathy between Scot and Norman English, between Frank and German Austrian, makes the European-Saracen conflict more than irrelevant, actually absurd."⁶⁹ Its possible absurdity aside, the conflict is relevant because the pressures of otherness highlight Europe's untenable unity, as the scheming Marquis of Montserrat declares to the Grand Master of the Templars: "I have unloosed the bonds which held together this bunch of sceptres and lances—thou wilt see them shortly fall asunder" (T, 118). With the opening fight and the banner episode Scott places Europe simultaneously in the dimensions of liminality and separation ("betwixt"), cohesion ("together"), and fragmentation ("asunder").

To be sure, it is hardly original to remark that The Talisman revolves around boundary-related issues and dynamics of identity and otherness. Gottlieb notes that the novel defies "British readers' assumptions regarding not only their 'civilizational' superiority, but also the very East-West opposition on which such assumptions depend," promoting "resistance to reifying the British global ambitions of his historical moment" and favoring modes of "thinking difference" beyond irreconcilable antitheses.⁷⁰ Relatedly, Ian Duncan views the East-West clash in Scott's crusader novels as a means to explore "an oriental horizon of imperial conquest, which is the site of an uncanny or demonic figuration of cultural origins;" and McCracken-Flesher reads The Talisman's narration of the self (Kenneth and Scotland, particularly) in the mirror of the Islamic other as mapping Scotland's "involvement within the colonial dynamic" and "Scottish otherness as agency," since Saladin mentors Kenneth into accepting his own otherness and turning his "silence into speech."⁷¹ Though valuable, such approaches leave aside Europe as a conflicted pre-transnational ensemble that, if brought back to center stage, illuminates further the novel's core questioning of what Wilt calls "the forces that will now make history."⁷²

In The Talisman Scott figures Europe from his 1820s standpoint and, as Henry argues, his critique of a Westphalian continental order resting on the twin principle that nations are delimited by their territorial borders and sovereign in their control of that territory. The novel manifests anxiety about the Westphalian myth of "internal, and nationalist cohesion" by revealing "the fractures and internal contradictions inherently at work in the [End Page 369] nationalist project."⁷³ In turn, it explodes the "ideological fantasy of Westphalian sovereignty, in which borders mark the limits of state power" and, I would add, of Europe as a geopolitical system based on such premises.⁷⁴ Primarily concerned with Scott's revision of the idea of the nation (ultimately Scotland and/in Britain), Henry also helps us reconsider how The Talisman re-envisions Europe as an intrinsically fissured unit. If this ambivalence is patent in familiar scenes such as those mentioned above, it also emerges in the usually overlooked presence of the troubadour, which adds literary-cultural features to the geopolitical issues emphasized by those scenes. For, in this novel, Scott capitalizes on the troubadour's embodiment of poetic origins and the cohesion of Europe's literary history, as well as on this figure's association with chivalry and the crusades, one elaborated at length by Warton in the first volume of History of English Poetry (1774), where he notes that during the first crusade "[t]he troubadours of Provence … took up arms, and followed their barons in prodigious multitudes to the conquest of Jerusalem," and rehearsed in panoramic accounts such as Russell's already mentioned History of Modern Europe.⁷⁵

In The Talisman Scott harnesses troubadour culture, especially Old Occitan poetics or gai saber, to portray European poetry as a unified tradition and a cultural counterpart to the supposedly unified crusading army. In the opening dialogue between Sheerkofh and Kenneth, the latter approves of "the love of minstrelsy and of the gai science," even if "we yield unto it even too much room in our thoughts when they should be bent on better things" (T, 26). Significantly, the "Joyeuse Science" is invoked again in the sections set in the crusader camp (T, 106, 238). But European poetry and troubadour poetics resonate among a variety of other voices, languages, and poetic-literary practices: Sheerkofh's "sonnets of love" and "lays in praise of wine" (T, 25) that scandalize Sir Kenneth; the "musical strains … produced by the pipes, shalms, and kettledrums of the Saracens" played near England's royal tent (T, 66); and the "tale of love and magic" (T, 203) recited by Hassan the "story-teller and poet by profession" (T, 203) in the train of Saladinas-Hakim the physician. Emphasizing the adjacency and overlap of Eastern and Western poetry and music, Scott implicitly references the Hispano-Arab or Saracenic theories that saw the origins of Old Occitan poetry, and romance more generally, in Islamic literary civilization through cultural contacts in the Iberian Peninsula and the crusades, a widely debated interpretation endorsed, for [End Page 370] instance, by Sismondi in De la littérature du midi de l'Europe, which Scott owned in Thomas Roscoe's 1823 English translation. In The Talisman, literary-cultural cohesion is a façade that conceals an endless flow of transcultural exchanges and admixtures.

Sir Kenneth mentions the gai saber in his first dialogue with Sheerkohf, where his shock at hearing the Muslim's poems and songs underscores the cultural distance between them. Just as tellingly, the troubadour theme returns near the end of the novel, in Book IV, and at the heart of the crusader camp: inside King Richard's tent, during a council of war. As the monarch is about to receive news about the numbers of his army at Ascalon from the baron Thomas de Vaux, his favorite poet, Blondel de Nesle, enters unexpectedly. Interrupting the military conversation, he turns the king's attention to poetry: "'Blondel de Nesle!' he exclaimed joyfully—'welcome from Cyprus, my king of minstrels! welcome to the King of England, who rates not his own dignity more highly than he does thine … And what news, my gentle master, from the land of the lyre? Anything fresh from the trouveurs of Provence?—anything from the minstrels of merry Normandy?'" (T, 237).

Scott represents King Richard's enthusiastic reaction to Blondel's arrival by drawing on the historic connections between the monarch and the troubadour and courtois traditions: Thomas Rymer numbered him among the "Provencial" poets, and the legend was well known of his liberation from Dürnstein castle, where he had been imprisoned by the Archduke of Austria, with the help of Blondel, who journeyed across the Holy Roman Empire singing melodies familiar to Richard in order to locate him (this narrative was reworked by Sismondi in De la littérature du midi, Hemans in "The Troubadour, and Richard Cœur de Lion," and Porden in Coeur de Lion, among others).⁷⁶ Richard I was the great-grandson of William IX of Poitou, known as "the first troubadour," and the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, famously the patroness of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn, whom she brought to England (1152–55). Armed with this pedigree, Scott's king-poet greets Blondel in suitably transcultural terms. Blondel arrives from Cyprus, a place of transit and contact, and thus himself an embodiment of East-West transits. Also, Richard hails him as a minstrel. Technically, being from the North of France, he was a trouvère, but Scott mixes northern and southern traditions by making the king enquire about "the trouveurs of Provence." In addition, Blondel is a figure of contact with Normandy and its poets, once again [End Page 371] called "minstrels;" but, unlike Scott's last minstrel, he is an early minstrel and an originary voice in a narrative depicting poetry within a context of socio-political forces and geocultural ramifications. Richard is the center of a network of countries: England, Normandy, France, Provence, Cyprus, and Palestine; and, though originally from Normandy, Blondel also belongs to a transcultural network of poetic creation and transmission. In this context, the odd phrase "trouveurs of Provence" deserves attention, especially given Scott's knowledge of troubadour culture. Indeed, it could be no more than a slip, perhaps caused by the fact that, in 1824–25, his attention was divided between the composition of The Talisman and its companion crusader novel, The Betrothed. However, since by this time Scott knew his troubadours from his trouvères, it is likely that this misnomer has something to do with the king's and Blondel's transcultural affiliations. For "trouveurs of Provence" jarringly but effectively condenses a blurring of lines: it recalls the divide of the Loire separating the oc and oïl linguistic, cultural, and political domains, but also the osmosis between them, therefore hinting at a line that is both boundary and threshold.

Admittedly, reading "trouveurs of Provence" as overtly transnational would be anachronistic, since eleventh-century France and Provence were dynastic and cultural, rather than fully integrated national, entities. But, on one hand, Scott is often less than accurate in this respect, and, on the other, affiliations are often blurry within The Talisman's crusader army. In addition, Scott's geocultural map is expanded and complicated further by a multilingual context that, implicitly or explicitly, comprises English, Norman French, Provençal, Italian, and Arabic. After Blondel's has finished performing a song ("The Bloody Vest") in the "Norman language," Richard remarks: "'Thou hast changed the measure upon us unawares in that last couplet, my Blondel;'" to which the poet replies: "'Most true, my lord … I rendered the verses from the Italian of an old harper, whom I met in Cyprus, and nor have I had time either to translate it accurately, or commit it to memory, I am fain to supply gaps in the music and the verse as I can upon the spur of the moment, as you see boors mend a quickset fence with a faggot'" (T, 242). Assimilating his poetic creation to practical, rustic handiwork, the minstrel also includes it in the extensively polyglot panorama inhabited by a travelling composer-performer. Specifically, his words convey an idea of the channels of exchange and circulation in the southern and [End Page 372] eastern areas of a Mediterranean basin dotted with literary-cultural entrepôts like Cyprus, which are as many transcultural relay points and designate an early, not yet transnational, form of what Emily Apter calls a "translation zone," that is "a zone of critical engagement that connects the 'l' and the 'n' of transLation and transNation."⁷⁷ Emanating from this space of translational encounters and exchanges, Blondel's is poetry on the move, caught up in a rapidly developing process of physical displacement, memorization, and oral transmission. His verse visibly differs from Sir Kenneth's idea of a Western "minstrelsy" and "gai science" (T, 26) as distinct from the Eastern tradition represented by Saladin's love and drinking songs. Similarly, when Richard ponders Blondel's choice of "these rattling rolling Alexandrines … which sound like the charge of cavalry" and his penchant for the "new-fangled restriction of … terminating in accurate and similar rhymes" (T, 242), he concentrates on a hybrid feature, the diffusion of rhyme, originating in the twelfth century possibly from cultural cross-fertilizations with Arab poetry.⁷⁸

Not merely an opportunity for Scott to display his erudition, Blondel's performance is a means to promote an idea of early poetry as the crucible of European literature in the making, with its components visibly in place: technical features, thematic materials, composition, performance, patronage, criticism, and reception. Condensing transitional, transcultural, and translational forces, Blondel embodies the medieval poetic continuum outlined in another work published in 1825, Edgar Taylor and Sarah Austin's collection of Lays of the Minnesingers (which Scott owned), whose extensive introduction presents medieval poetry as a transcultural and embryonically transnational archive with Provence at its center (the author, Taylor, regularly draws upon Raynouard's scholarship) and which makes its main subject appealing to readers by styling them "the German troubadours."⁷⁹ A reflection of this background, the scene in Richard's tent proclaims Europe's cultural cohesion by re-echoing the initial contrast between Kenneth and Sheerkohf; yet, even as Blondel symbolizes Europe's shared poetic idiom, his performance highlights overlaps and admixtures with otherness, and emphasizes the gaps in the Western coalition. In allusive fashion, this ambivalence mirrors Scott's contemporaneous vision of Europe informed by what Crawford calls a tendency to reconciliation and by a critique, seen also in De Pradt's Congress of Vienna, of the Westphalian myth of the continent's geopolitical [End Page 373] balance undertowing the crusader novels' "sustained dismantling" of a fictional model "celebrating the evolving accommodation of different identities subgroups within a unified nation-state."⁸⁰ Though The Talisman closes on reconciliation with Sir Kenneth and Edith Plantagenet's union, it relentlessly portrays a fissured panorama, which Scott unfolds further in the proto-modern contexts of his Franco-Burgundian fictions.

A sequel of sorts to Quentin Durward, concluding with the defeat and death of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Anne of Geierstein pivots on the continental journey of the Earl of Oxford and his son, disguised as merchants (the old and young Arthur Philipson), to convince the duke to uphold the cause of the House of Lancaster and Margaret of Anjou, in exile in France after the Yorkist victory at Tewksbury. This mission introduces the Englishmen to the tensions between Burgundy and the Swiss cantons, the expansionism of France's Louis XI, and the weak position of Provence under Margaret's aged father, René of Anjou, while England plans to benefit from this context to reconquer "Normandy and Guyenne."⁸¹ Scott mentions Charles of Burgundy's takeover of Lorraine and amassing of troops near Strasbourg, as well as the "unfriendly dispositions" of the German Emperor and the Duke of Austria.⁸² He then references the enmity of the "Free Imperial Cities" (AG, 186) and Louis XI's maneuvering, thus deepening Quentin Durward's portrayal of a continent where "feudal law is becoming obsolete even in the Empire."⁸³ Concurrently, modern monarchies are forming, while the "freedom of Swiss commerce" signals the onset of commercial modernity (AG, 100).

The main setting in the novel's third volume, Provence is a pawn in Margaret's machinations with Charles of Burgundy, who is promised to be made successor to King René in exchange for supporting the Lancastrian cause. Among Scott's advisors, James Ballantyne censured his decision to focus on Provence, King René, and the troubadours, whereas Robert Cadell thought that, "although Ballantyne growls at old King René he forgets that his character is in relief to that of Charles of Burgundy," his words therefore suggesting a way to re-evaluate the novel's disparaged final section through the role of Provence and troubadour culture in it (AG, 416). As the Earl of Oxford says, "France and Burgundy are hanging like vultures over Provence" (AG, 289); however, the country and its capital, Aix, are not mere objects of foreign ambition, but also the decisive sites where the narrative's historical [End Page 374] climax takes shape. René's refusal of Margaret's request to disown his grandson Ferrand de Vaudemont's claim to Lorraine in favor of Burgundy dictates Charles the Bold's subsequent military moves, leading to the disastrous battles of Morat and Nancy, where he dies. In other words, Provence plays a part in the process, foreshadowed by The Talisman, of the decline of chivalry and feudal fealty, and the early modern emergence of national monarchies and territorial demarcations eventually sanctioned by the Westphalian system. In addition, as Cadell remarked, le bon roi René is a foil to the impetuous and overreaching Charles, his peaceful realm representing an alternative to aggressively centralizing Burgundy (and France) and thus a route not taken by Europe's early modern monarchies. In this frame, the troubadours no longer signify Europe's cultural continuum, but a local peculiarity turned into historical pageantry. Yet, if they are reduced to a remnant of the past, it is one that speaks to the present of late fifteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Europe alike.

The importance Scott attached to the Provence/troubadour theme in the third volume of Anne of Geierstein appears from his gathering as much accurate information as possible from Jean-Pierre Papon's Histoire générale de Provence (1776–86), Anne Plumptre's Narrative of a Three Year's Residence in France (1810), and his friend James Skene of Rubislaw's accounts of his journeys in the South of France for details on the landscape and general atmosphere.⁸⁴ Scott also drafted a long section on the history and poetry of the troubadours, which however he was prevailed upon to shorten.⁸⁵ As with The Talisman, references to the troubadours and their tradition appear in scattered form (there is an early mention of "ancient troubadours and minnesingers," [AG, 106]) before the more extensive treatment in book III, when young "Arthur Phillipson" travels to Provence to seek an audience with King René. On approaching the country, his Provençal guide, Thiebault, begins to describe it in "fluent and interesting" terms, and soon broaches the topic of the country's ancient poets:

a race of native poets of Provençal origin, differing widely from the minstrels of Normandy, and the adjacent provinces of France, with whose tales of chivalry, as well as the numerous translations of their works into Norman-French and English, Arthur, like most of the noble youth of his country, was intimately acquainted and deeply embued. Thiebault boasted that his grandsire, of humble birth indeed, but of distinguished talent, was one of this gifted race, [End Page 375] whose compositions produced so great an effect on the temper and manners of their age and country. It was, however, to be regretted, that inculcating as the prime duty of life a fantastic spirit of gallantry, which sometimes crossed the Platonic bound prescribed to it, the poetry of the Troubadours was too frequently used to soften and seduce the heart, and corrupt the principles.

(AG, 318)

This passage intimates what Scott's original section on the troubadours would have been: a somewhat didactic but engaging distillation of scholarship, in keeping with his essays on chivalry and romance. Unlike what happens in The Talisman, there are no intentional or unintentional slips: the troubadours are not called trouveurs. The absence of any nominalistic confusion reflects clearly separated linguistic and cultural domains: the Provençal literary tradition differs widely from the other French traditions. The notion of a European cultural and literary continuum undergoes some substantial modifications, too. Arthur's literary knowledge bears witness to a pan-European continuity of tales and forms based on translation and circulation; still, the troubadours are described as native to Provence and, instead of forming the basis of European cultural modernity, the effects of their art are visible only in "the temper and manners of their age and country," and not at a transcultural level. And such effects are not beneficial but corrupting influences.

Scott compounds this evaluation of troubadour culture and its heritage by making Arthur and Thiebault discuss a tale, sung by the latter, of "a Troubadour, named William Cabestaing, who loved, par amours, a noble and beautiful Lady Margaret, the wife of a baron called Raymond de Roussillon" (AG, 318). In this well-known tale, reprised in countless works from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349–51) to Stendhal's De l'Amour (Of Love, 1822), and reworked in the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1807, the troubadour Guilhem de Cabestany falls in love with the wife of Count Raimon of Castell Rosselló, who discovers them, kills Guilhem, and feeds his heart to his wife. When he eventually reveals what she has been feasting on, she jumps out of a window to her death.⁸⁶

As with the episode in King Richard's tent in The Talisman, Scott conjures up a scene of performance and reception, but with a very different outcome. Thiebault's "melancholy tale" moves Arthur, who is "even beguiled … of a few tears," but his next reaction is harshly to reprimand the Provençal: "Thiebault, sing me no more such lays. I have heard my father say, that the readiest mode to [End Page 376] corrupt a Christian man, is to bestow upon vice the pity and the praise which are due only to virtue. Your Baron of Roussillon is a monster of cruelty; but your unfortunate lovers were not the less guilty. It is by giving fair names to foul actions, that those who would start at real vice are led to practise it, under the disguise of virtue" (AG, 319). Echoing Sir Kenneth's strictures, the English aristocrat's denunciation of the corrupting dangers of fiction reflects his fiery nature and pre-puritanical beliefs. However, the exchange also testifies to a wider-ranging cultural sea-change, since young Arthur's reaction highlights the inability of troubadour tradition to cross linguistic-cultural borders and to function as common cultural currency. It is no longer the literary lingua franca of postclassical Europe. Thus, the fact that Cabestany's story does not speak to young De Vere discloses a cultural gap where there used to be continuity. Thiebault responds jocularly to his remarks: "Fie, sir, you are too young to be so strict a censor of morals. What will you do when your head is grey, if you are thus severe when it is scarcely brown?" (AG, 319). Then, in a more serious tone, he remarks: "'I would you knew, Seignor,' answered Thiebault, 'that this Lay of Cabestaing, and the Lady Margaret of Roussillon, is reckoned a masterpiece of the joyous science'" (AG, 319). The optative tone in would implies nostalgia for a time when gai saber was shared, transcultural knowledge. That the young Englishman does not know does not reflect on his degree of cultivation, but points more broadly to the fact that troubadour poetry no longer forms part of the translational/transnational lines of contact and exchange around which European culture and civilization coalesce.

Arthur's and Thiebault's conversation leads seamlessly to the picture of a decadent Provence and King René's ridiculously ineffectual court at Aix. On the way there, young de Vere remarks "the total absence of armed men and soldiers" (AG, 323) in a "peaceful country" (AG, 323) where "cavalier[s]" (AG, 323) carry only "a short sword … for show rather than use" (AG, 323). A much more conspicuous accessory is the harp, which "attested the character of a Troubadour," the appellation now denoting no more than a pose "affected by men of all ranks" (AG, 323). The king himself is styled "the King of the Troubadours" (AG, 320) ruling over "the Arcadia of France" (AG, 323). He also poses as a troubadour, as Arthur notes during his first audience with the monarch, when he finds René of Anjou carrying "his tablets, and a pencil, in his hand," (AG, 325) surrounded by several personages [End Page 377] holding "rebecks, rotes, small portable harps" (AG, 325). Promoting garish entertainments at court, the monarch increasingly appears a ludicrous, clownish figure, a portrayal that climaxes when he plans a pageant to welcome Margaret in Aix, in which he would appear "in the character of old Palemon … at the head of an Arcadian procession of nymphs and swains, to inspire whose choral dances and songs, every pipe and tambourine in the country was to be placed in requisition" (AG, 345–6). Nothing could be further from the early cultural milieu that produced tales like that of Guilhem de Cabestany, a context in conversation with other European cultural areas and revered as the fountainhead of modern literature.

Through King René and his court, Scott tells a tale of decadence rehearsing the themes of decline and demise in bardic discourse generally and his Lay of the Last Minstrel specifically. The depleted civilization of southern France is the past, the north is the future, and Provence is eventually annexed to the French territories. This situation parallels the growing preponderance, from the eighteenth century onwards, of northern Europe over the south as the epicenter of cultural modernity—what Roberto Dainotto terms a progressive "north-centric" reorienting.⁸⁷ Time and again, the novels' (northern) political protagonists mock King René's troubadourism to justify their acquisitive designs. Margaret despises her father's "ideot gaiety" and his court with its "eternal tinkling of harps" (AG, 269); and should he obtain the cession of Provence, Charles the Bold promises he will grant King René "a court of Troubadours, who shall do nothing but drink, flute, and fiddle to him" (AG, 282). Coming from such questionable figures, this insistence on Provençal degeneration speaks volumes. Embodying Realpolitik, the former queen and the duke represent the historical forces propelling the dismantlement of the feudal-chivalric order that lays the ground for Westphalian Europe. They are also morally problematic figures—unscrupulous, scheming, and exploitative—embodying modernity's destructive and substitutive dynamics. Instead, as noted above, Provence and its troubadour remnants represent an antithesis to this system and the possibility of a different historical development, as appears from René's unexpectedly outraged reaction at Margaret's proposal to disown his grandson of Lorraine: "I am ashamed for thee. Thy pride is an excuse for thy evil temper; but what is pride worth which can stoop to counsel an act of dishonourable meanness?" (AG, 352). Employing the troubadour theme to picture a waning but not [End Page 378] lifeless or superannuated world, Scott expands and deepens his fictional examination of a "rapidly changing European framework" of political instability, shifting boundaries, clashing geopolitical systems, and violence, thus fully justifying Alexander's view of Anne of Geierstein as a work that "illustrates the darkening of Scott's historical vision in the final part of his career."⁸⁸ Its third volume throws into relief Provence and troubadour culture as a remnant disconnected from the flow of history and the present, but still affecting them. Because supersession in bardic discourse is never a finished process, the past but present troubadours in Anne of Geierstein provide a speculative lens to analyze the conditions of a pre- and post-Westphalian modernity marked, as Manning stresses, by "violence and lawlessness" in a narrative "poised literally and figuratively on the brink of an abyss."⁸⁹

________

Saturated with Romantic-era scholarship that Scott's readers could have known from periodical and other publications, The Talisman and Anne of Geierstein give related but divergent interpretations of the troubadour theme. In the former, it is a lynchpin within the poetic matrix that generated European literary modernity as a cohesive but hybrid complex, while in the latter it is a remnant that serves critically to illuminate the geopolitical and cultural modernity stemming from the fifteenth-century wars. Broadly, Scott's treatments of troubadour culture re-echo Romantic re-evaluations of originary phases and their pressure on the present, and the role of figures of poetic voicing in delineating national cultural identities. More particularly, his post-Napoleonic and post-Vienna troubadours are transcultural and transnational constructs that reinforce a conception of Europe based on what McCracken-Flesher sees as Scott's dismantling of "restrictive terms" and the countervailing valorization of "constant movement" and transformation of seemingly fixed boundaries and identities.

Between the immediate Napoleonic aftermath and the late 1820s, Scott's continental vision and imaginary grew to include memories of "the grand military dance" of the long French wars, the postwar economic downturn, a Congress system that (as in de Pradt's view) was a failed successor to an obsolete Westphalian accommodation, and a web of intensifying international tensions. Narrating the troubadour as a geopolitically relevant embodiment of poetic [End Page 379] imagination, The Talisman and Anne of Geierstein make literature and poetry into crucial sites for deciphering the forces at play within Europe's fraught unity. In these narratives, the troubadour signifies both a shared European dimension and its divergences—the continent's paradoxically centrifugal cohesiveness. Just as valuably, these novels' troubadour engagements illuminate Scott's 1820s European-themed fictions as further developments in what Duncan views as his career-long attuning of "the default setting" of the English novel to "a larger European frame of 'international literary space.'"⁹⁰

Reading Scott's engagements with troubadour culture throws light on how his fictional and non-fictional texts function through different forms of enmeshing. This essay's explorations of Scott's troubadours have addressed textual assemblages; such conceptual dyads as origins and modernity, the foreign and the local, the literary and the geopolitical; and, pivotally, Europe as a reticulation of continuities and gaps. Many of the recurrent images in the previous pages—the dance, the concert, the congress, the cultural entrepôt, or songs and melodies—refer to processes of mixing and interrelating, as well as clash and disharmony. The troubadour sets these complexities into relief through its ties to the beginnings of Europe's postclassical literary culture and its transitional status between origins and contemporaneity, East and West, or the medieval and the modern. Transiting across Scott's post-Napoleonic and 1820s output, the troubadour condenses his jointly geocultural and geopolitical interpretation of historical-cultural systems and, by this very token, contributes to consolidating his vision of Europe as a space of contending forces of harmonization and conflict, confluence and dispersal.