Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers.But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies.
The only comparative study of its kind, " Songbook" treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category poetry: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to...