Sins and Signatures: A Musical Book Launch

This event combines an early music concert with the launch of L’auteur retrouvé (Droz, 2025) by Julien Stout, French medievalist at Princeton University. The program features lutenist and singer Kerry Bursey, who will perform troubadour and trouvère songs carefully selected to echo the central themes of the book. Together, the launch and the concert invite the audience to experience medieval authorship not only as an idea on the page, but as a living practice shaped by sound, voice, and performance.

In his study, Julien Stout reexamines a key chapter in literary history: the so-called “birth of the French author.” Rather than retelling the common story of a transition from anonymous oral song to the authoritative, “subjective,” and written book during the medieval period, L’auteur retrouvé shows how, between the 12th and 14th centuries, vernacular authorship was at once collectively constructed and undermined in a nascent, transnational French-speaking book market. At the heart of this inquiry lies a paradoxical discovery: in contrast with Latin and Occitan authors of the same period, French authorial figures such as Adam de la Halle, Adenet le Roi, and Rutebeuf often appear to be marginal, “polyphonic,” and self-deprecating, claiming authorship over — that is, signing — sins, turned into poetry and music.

For more information on the book CLICK HERE

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

La Maison Française NYU, 16 Washington Mews, New York, United States