IMC 2026: Sessions

This panel asks how written records of songs and poetry might both reveal and obscure the experience of performance, and how practice-led or comparative approaches can illuminate their sonic and social dimensions. A Hebrew-script Arabic poem from the Cairo Genizah demonstrates the performative vitality of rhythmic form, dance, and sensual imagery, testifying to the circulation of musical and poetic traditions across Mediterranean cultures. Trouvère chansonniers, meanwhile, complicate questions of authorship and melody: cases of apparent “self-contrafaction” raise doubts about the stability of attribution, showing how scribes, poets, and performers together negotiated the ownership and authority of song. In and around the Latin East, literary texts in Latin, Old French, and Arabic reveal a shared soundscape: authors mobilized auditory imagery to craft cross-cultural exchange while also insisting on religious and cultural difference. Together, these papers probe the affordances of performance for texts transmitted in writing—whether as songs, as imagined sounds, or as collaborative acts of circulation and adaptation. By highlighting variation, attribution, and sonic imagination, the session demonstrates how medieval texts functioned as ongoing activities: inviting participation, revoicing, and reinterpretation, while shaping the experience of identity, community, and desire through performance.