IMC 2026: Sessions

This panel examines how songs and poetry created, mediated, and reflected human networks: binding together communities across languages, faiths, and genres. Epic and lyric traditions in Old French and Old Occitan were not separate domains but shared song cultures: troubadours and trouvères invoked figures like Roland, Charlemagne, and Ganelon, weaving older epic memory into courtly lyric as it generated new heroes. Jewish, Christian, and interfaith communities in medieval France engaged with Hebrew and faux-Hebrew poetics, whose sonorities could unite or divide: producing resonant, authoritative forms of communal expression for Jewish audiences that provoked ambivalent responses amongst Christians. Meanwhile, thirteenth-century motets developed as dense palimpsests of sung experience, forging networks of melody and text that linked performers and audiences across shifting contexts. Each paper highlights how the reuse, adaptation, and revoicing of songs and poems invited participation and negotiation, while building overlapping worlds of meaning.