Profile

Julien R. Stout’s research focuses on the “birth of the French author” in the transnational market of medieval book production as well as the sonic and sensorial experiences of multilingualism in sung poetry involving Old Occitan, Old French, and French written in Hebrew script (“Judeo-French”). Moreover, prof. Stout is interested in how contemporary theories of subjectivity obfuscate our relationships to the Medieval past.

His first book, L’auteur retrouvé : l’avènement des premières collections (Geneva, Droz: 2025)  shows how, from the 12th century to the early 14th century, the concept of authorship was subverted, as it was being invented, in some of the earliest French-speaking manuscript collections arranged by author. This study departs from medieval studies’ dominant teleological, lyric-centered narrative, which equates this “birth” with a shift from the anonymous, oral song to the writerly and authorized book, associated with the rise of subjectivity. Rather, it analyzes a wide selection of authorial collections containing lyric poetry as well as some previously neglected biographies of women saints and other religious texts that reflect the full diversity of medieval editorial practices of authorship. The book argues that authorial collections appeared in francophone manuscripts for reasons other than mere “authorial intent”: they were collectively crafted by the patronesses, scribes, and editors involved in the transnational vernacular book market of the time. More importantly, it shows that the notion of the French author was a marginal idea, mainly perceived as a ludicrous distortion of the well-established authors of the Latin and Occitan writerly cultures of the same period. Indeed, for the most part, the French-speaking literary world produced self-deprecating authorial figures unable to claim ownership over anything but what God could not author: their own sins, turned into poetry.

Prof. Stout’s second book project, Sounding Foreign: The Poetics of Multilingualism in Christian and Jewish Vernacular Song, will combine sound studies with codicology, in order to provide the first joint study of Christian and Jewish vernacular multilingual songs, mixing Old French, Occitan, Latin, Hebrew, and/or Arabic. These sung poems are unique in their illustration of cultural contact in the Middle Ages. By challenging the listeners’ linguistic abilities, they create an opaque mode of poetic expression destined to offer audiences primarily sonic and sensorial experience of language. The book will analyze medieval and modern theories of language and music, as well as multilingual poems and their multifaceted manuscript traditions. It will focus on how the interaction of languages, within the formalized context of sung poetry, was used as an experimental observatory of the melodies, sounds, cultural identities, gendered voices (female, male, angelic), and spaces (church, court, marketplace, synagogue) it turned into song. This study also intends to include a critical edition of a small yet representative selection of some of the multilingual poems of the corpus. This will be an experimental edition, which is intended to be combined with collaborations with musical and sound artists. It will draw attention on the often-neglected shapeshifting graphic transcriptions of these multi-sensory poems across borders and time.  

Other publications by Prof. Stout include several articles on the verse continuations of Chrétien de Troye’s Conte du Graal; a study of the paratextual phenomenology of late-medieval booklists; an article questioning the paternalistic concept of oeuvre de jeunesse by reassessing the poetics of youth in medieval literature; and a forthcoming analysis of the impact of genre on the shifting representations of sea voyages and ethnic monstrosity in Anglo-Norman accounts of the conversion of England to Christianity.  

Research Interests

• Medieval music and sound studies 
• Sonic experiences of multilingual song
• Old French written in Hebrew script
• Vernacular and Latin models of authorship and authority
• Manuscript and material culture 

Publications

Monographs

• L’auteur retrouvé. L’avènement des premiers recueils à collections auctoriales de langue française au Moyen Âge central (Geneva: Droz), in press (2025). 

Articles in Refereed Journals 

• “Réévaluer la notion d’œuvre de jeunesse dans la production, la transmission et la réception de la littérature médiévale : l’exemple de Chrétien de Troyes et de Charles d’Orléans”, Encomia, no 44 (2022): 173-207. 
• “Repenser la médiation manuscrite de la parole de l’auteur médiéval, entre confiance, confession et foi”, Intermédialités, Confier, no 40 (Fall 2022): 1-29. 
• “Aux seuils du paratexte médiéval : les auteurs français et leur nom dans les inventaires aristocratiques de la fin du Moyen Âge”, Isabelle Arseneau, Véronique Dominguez, Sébastien Douchet & Patrick Moran (dir.), Perspectives médiévales, Les études médiévales face à Gérard Genette, no 42 (2021)
• “Une vie en plusieurs exemplaires. Observations sur le contexte manuscrit des Poèmes de l’Infortune de Rutebeuf”, Études françaises, Lire en contexte : enquête sur les fabliaux, vol. 48, no 2, (2012): 33–58. 
• “L’héritage mobile du roman médiéval : l’incursion du Bel Inconnu dans la Seconde Continuation du Conte du Graal”, Memini, travaux et documents, no 14 (2010): 25–48. 
• “Une réécriture crépusculaire : la synthèse meurtrière du genre romanesque de Manessier dans la Troisième Continuation du Graal”, Littératures, Ré-écrire l’histoire, actes du III^e colloque estudiantin de l’Université McGill (11 et 12 novembre 2010), no 13 (Decembre 2012): 39–69.  
• “Le cortège du Graal ou l’exégèse malaisée”, Fragments, no 2 (2007): 29–49. 

Forthcoming

• “Mort de l’auctor, naissance de l’auteur et jeux d’éditeurs : l’étonnant rapport aux écrivains antiques dans le manuscrit 3142 de la bibliothèque de l’Arsenal”, Troianalexandrina, no 23 (2023), in press, 35 pages.
• “Anges, massacres, et queues de poissons : trois récits anglo-normands du voyage de conversion de l’Angleterre au christianisme”, Arborescences, no 14 (2024), under review, 20 pages.
• “Balbutier, jubiler, tochier : à propos de quelques usages sonores et formels du multilinguisme dans les prières juives et chrétiennes en ancien français”, Études françaises 62, no 1 (2025), under review, 27 pages.

Book Chapters

• “Jacques de Baisieux, les fabliaux et la fonction­auteur dans les manuscrits de langue d’oïl : survol critique et analyse de cas”, Philippe Haugeard et Silvère Menegaldo (dir.), Du nouveau sur le fabliau. Actes du colloque d’Orléans, Paris, Honoré Champion (2024): 59-96. 
• “Sire trouvère et roi trouvé. Aspects géographique, poétique et politique de la production des manuscrits de Watriquet de Couvin”, Gabriele Giannini et Francis Gingras (dir.), Les centres de production des manuscrits vernaculaires au Moyen Âge, Paris, Classiques Garnier (2016): 175–200.