The 2013-2014 lecture continued on from the previous year, using examples to explore in greater depth the answer to the question posed: "What is the poet's name?". We began by recalling the meaning of this question and the approach taken to answer it.
The literary theory of the late twentiethcentury , which emphasized the immanent reading of texts and questioned the very notion of the author, has been replaced in recent years by a resolutely biographical approach to criticism. At the same time, historical studies have undergone a similar evolution: biography was discredited by the contempt with which event history was held, and even by the idea that the destinies and decisions of individuals could have a decisive influence on the lecture of history. But the somewhat reluctant lifting of the ban on biographies came from the Annales school itself, with Jacques Le Goff's Saint-Louis in 1995, and since then, the greatest historians write biographies, and the most influential works are often biographies.
Medieval poetry has been used in the service of these successive orientations of literary theory, criticism and history with regard to the notion of the author. A few decades ago, we saw a confirmation of prevailing convictions concerning literature in general, the workings of the mind and even social ideology, on the one hand in its frequent anonymity, which seemed to be one of its characteristic features, since it was already essential to the interpretation given to it by Romanticism and had subsequently been little called into question, despite the discredit, unjust though it was, of Romantic medievalism, and, on the other, in the formal character which, it was thought, defined it. Today, when writers' biographies seem to be an essential approach to understanding literature, we are becoming aware that medieval biography is far from being as systematically anonymous as it once was. Interest in the forms taken by the author's relationship to his work invites us to take a fresh look at the poet's play on his name, the revelation and concealment of his identity, his masks, and the various forms of his presence in the work, all of which provide a significant proportion of poetic material. The literature of the Middle Ages, which once provided arguments to erase the author's name, now provides arguments to show its importance.
This was the starting point for the 2012-2013 lecture. The first example tackled, that of the chansons de geste through the name of Turoldus in the last line of the Chanson de Roland and that of Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in the songs where he appears(Girart de Vienne, Beuve de Hantone, Doon de Nanteuil), justified the hypothesis that the question of the poet's name could help us understand medieval literature as a whole. In chansons de geste, the division of an author's persona or figura between the juggler who performs the song, on the one hand, and the composer of the text, on the other, was to be expected; but the tendency to confuse and accredit the two figures by making them, over the course of versions and reworkings, a character in the story was not. It defies our conceptions of verisimilitude while suggesting a particular type of adherence to literary narrative. It also finds equivalents in cases that call for an even greater commitment, that of faith. In a13th-century French sermon, for example, we read: "Moses wrote in the Pentateuch that after the death of Moses...".
Two provisional conclusions have been proposed: the poet is treated as a character; the poem precedes the poet. What do these two formulas mean? How do we move from one to the other?