Translation and the Work of Assembly in the Medieval Pastourelle

Abstract: The medieval pastourelle has incurred much renewed scrutiny for its narratives of sexual encounter between a knight and a shepherdess and how they connect to a modern experience of sexual assault. The genre's heyday was in thirteenth-century Old French, but it manifests in many other medieval vernacular languages. Music is plentiful in the French manuscripts, and melodies as well as words could be transferred from one song to another. Drawing on Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social via the concept of a "work of assembly," this article argues for a new reading of this highly translated and translatable genre. Melodic and textual structures are analyzed in three case studies: within a single pastourelle, across a mini network of pastourelles, and as displayed in a moment of cultural transfer between French and English. This prompts a new claim that contrafacture is a form of translation. Further analysis of the mobile formal characteristics of pastourelle motifs in English as well as French leads to reflection on what this formulaicness might mean for an understanding of genre and of the social practices that transmitted it. The formulaic character of pastourelles demands careful and cautious processes of critical assembly. Far from distancing an audience from the visceral experience of human encounter, the surface clash of positions in formulaic composition casts such experience into uncomfortably sharp relief.