"As we said earlier": Parody, pastiche, plagiarism? How to make new work in the Middle Ages

Transtextual renderings of literary works in the Middle Ages were so complex and fluid that today's definitions intended for modern and contemporary texts essentially don't apply. The notion of pastiche is problematic for this period which preceded an organized literary institution and the emergence of an author figure progressively identified as creator. Moreover, the fact that medieval literature includes a diversity of ways of rewriting such …