Tricia Postle

PhD thesis: Performing early vernacular narrative in Romans.

My project looks at the performance of medieval narrative poetry before 1150, in the language generally known to its speakers as Romans. These works often describe themselves as chansons, but musical notation, when it is found at all, is fragmentary. I closely examine three works: the anonymous Canço de Santa Fe (c. 1060) written in an early form of Catalan or Occitan, the Anglo-Norman Estorie des Engles by Geffrei Gaimar (c. 1137) and the Old French Floire et Blancheflor (c. 1150, sometimes attributed to Robert d'Orbigny). In addition, I examine contemporary Latin discussion of the repertoire, in the works of Johannes de Grocheio and other sources. To demonstrate the complex interaction between music, rhetoric, theatre, and performance space, I will create videos presenting excerpts in collaboration with my trio, Pneuma Ensemble.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

I first discovered Old Occitan troubadour song as a teenager, and since my undergraduate days I have been involved with the University of Toronto's pre-modern theatre group, Poculi Ludique Societas. The most direct inspiration for this research has been my work with Pneuma Ensemble, originally formed in 2014 to explore 12th and 13th century song, but also known since 2016 for interpretation of longer narrative works in Old French, Middle English, and Latin.