IMC 2026: Sessions

This session explores how poetry and song are positioned and function in reconstructing lives, identities, and communities in the medieval world. These three papers examine the possibilities and limits of different records in shaping musical lives, while also asking how works themselves, through transmission and reuse, accumulated layered biographies across time. What does it mean to live with texts that shift meaning? And how were such transformations sustained across generations of family, community, and memory? Imad al-Din al-Isfahani’s vast poetic anthology, rooted in personal encounters, illuminates how bureaucratic and literary networks overlapped. The Craon family, read through the figure of Isabelle de Meulan, reveals how documentary evidence enriches the poetic corpus for the family, embedding song within strategies of lineage, power, and patronage. The shifting afterlives of Le jeu de Robin et de Marion show how songs and dramas could be continually recontextualized across different settings. These perspectives highlight the interplay between poetry, song, and memory, showing how the composition, compilation and reproduction of different kinds of texts could shape perceptions of family, social bonds and community identities.