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While medieval literature offers many models of solitary thinking, vernacular lyric confronts the problem of solitude in a unique mode, grappling and coping with this phenomenon that gives shape and texture to ambivalence and vexation. Comparing the event of lyric dispossession with Petrarch’s idea of solitude, this essay examines solitary presence as a musicopoetic art form across various vernacular traditions, from the Occitan works of Bernart de Ventadorn, William IX, and Arnaut Daniel to lyrics of the Iberian Peninsula, including the Mozarabic kharja (final stanzas of poems written in Arabic or Hebrew in the Romance dialect of Andalusia) and a Galician-Portuguese cantiga d’amigo (songs in which a young girl laments the absence of her lover). Lyric dispossession can affirm female desire despite its dominance as a male solitary presence in the courtly tradition. In the poetic dynamics of the muwashshah, discourses of dispossession compete through the interaction of different languages and social registers. The muwashshah poetics illuminates how the female-voiced solitary presence is maintained not only in the cantiga d’amigo but also in other genres such as trobairitz cansos and Old French crusade departure lyrics from the perspective of women left behind.

medieval transformation, and thus also of the 'locational turning point', which in eastern Central Europe stood at the beginning of the towns of the later Middle Ages" (406).As is obvious from these quotations-and alas, like other books in this series-the English translation here is awkward, sometimes inaccurate, and too often simply incomprehensible. It took this reader a long time to figure out that "locational towns" were those for which a locator (a kind of resettlement agent) recruited colonists. Even the book's title is bizarre; a more accurate rendering of the Czech original would be "The Transformation of the Czech Lands in the Middle Ages." The author cannot be faulted for translation lapses; Brill must do a better job of editing in spite of the difficulty of finding individuals conversant with both Czech and English in this specialized context. Nonetheless, the frustrating incomprehensibility of the English also stems from the author's methodological vagueness.To be sure, this book contains an enormous amount of raw information, some of it sure to pique the interest of medievalists unfamiliar with the Czech lands. But its methods are so problematic and its presentation so difficult to navigate that it cannot be recommended. To understand how the Czech lands were transformed in the thirteenth century will require a study with a narrower focus and a clearer model to identify and explain change per se. Whether as part of that investigation or separately, so, too, will the question of whether and how such changes constituted "Europeanization" require a fresher approach.