Rethinking Lyric Communities in Premodern Worlds

Taking the idea of lyric communities as both a critical question and a heuristic tool, this special issue of JMEMS explores how lyric poetry facilitated and shaped the formation of different kinds of community in Europe and Western Asia during the premodern era, engaging poetic filiation, social positioning, political grouping, religious bonding, affective engagement, and spiritual connection. Featuring contributions on Arabic, Occitan, Italian, English, French, Hebrew, and Persian poetry, the articles interrogate relationships between social groups and practices of writing, reading, performing, collecting, rewriting, and interpreting lyric poetry. This introductory essay highlights three pairs of dialectical tensions that arise in the relationships between lyric poetry as a social practice and community formation within the wider social space: mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, local and translocal dimensions, and the dynamics of competition and cooperation. These recurring tensions across literary traditions provide grounds for considering lyric poetry from transhistorical and global perspectives, moving beyond the conventional divide in current lyric studies between historicist and transhistoricist approaches. Conversely, the modes of production, circulation, and reception of lyric poetry provide an ideal opportunity to reconsider the premodern era across different regions, cultures, and epochs.