Keith Busby, Performance, trahison, espionnage, Le Moyen Age, Tome CXXI, 2015 : p. 663-676

Article xv of The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) prohibits Irish minstrels from performing in English households in Ireland on the grounds that they have been known to act as spies. Although this particular article is rooted in the specific context of late colonial Ireland and English push towards apartheid, the figure of the minstrel-spy is not uncommon in earlier literature in Old French. The role of Johan de Rampaygne in the Anglo-Norman prose romance, Fouke le Fitz Waryn (1325–1340), is examined as an example. Passages from a number of Old French and Occitan texts enable the establishment of a performance repertoire of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Later sections of this study consider the ways in which scribes, inadvertently or by aspects of mise en texte and mise en page, could betray the authors whose texts they transmit, and in which performers, through voice, gesture, and use of props, could potentially manipulate both the work being performed and its audience.