Elizabeth Hebbard

Phone:

(812) 855-6806

Email:

ehebbard@iu.edu

Department:

Department of French and Italian

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian and Co-Director of the IU Book Lab. I am a specialist in the literature and culture of medieval France and Occitania, and my research and teaching interests include authorship, medieval song, medieval manuscripts and manuscript fragments, and books as material culture. I am the Primary Principal Investigator on the Peripheral Manuscripts Project (funded by CLIR), which is a multi-year project to digitize and describe hundreds of medieval manuscripts in university, library, and museum collections throughout the Midwest--many of them for the first time.

My work primarily concerns medieval French and Occitan lyric composed in the 12th and 13th centuries and transmitted in manuscripts copied in the 13th and 14th centuries. My research explores notions of authorship and the relationship between lyric text and melodic setting. I investigate the fundamental tension between song as an ephemeral performance and as a fixed, written text, including the mise en page and manuscript context of song. On this last point, my work on lyric intersects with my other main research focus: medieval manuscripts and the history of the book. I have trained extensively as a paleographer of both Latin and vernacular writing systems, and as a codicologist studying the construction and production of medieval manuscript and early print books. I am particularly interested in manuscript fragments, and in using digital tools to virtually reassemble books that have been dismantled and libraries that have been dispersed.

I have two separate yet related book projects. The first is a new catalogue of troubadour lyric manuscripts, which, as my work demonstrates, are more numerous than previously thought. My second book project is a critical history of the troubadour lyric archive based on the revised and updated material record presented in the catalogue. I show that lesser-studied manuscripts challenge traditional notions of lyric authorship by demonstrating the extent to which these notions are rooted in the study of one kind of manuscript: the songbook.