"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 as the recycling motifs and topoi or parody makes each text a second text. There are nonetheless imitative examples that can be considered as pastiches. Our corpus will start with a group of sirventes-ensenhamens in which a troubadour challenges the skills of his minstrel by enumerating the works he should have in his repertoire. From the earliest piece, which serves as a model, we will identify different modes of relationships between the texts. The works selected for our analysis are consistent in depicting the image of authors and their mediators through their appropriation of what can be seen as a topos, demonstrating the authors' poetic repertoire and other talents.