‘Rap was looked at, back in the day, as something creative, something new …’ I’m reading a local arts weekly at the food court in my university's student union, taking a break from writing an article, this article, about medieval texts in which the author denounces performers who somehow misperform: who mangle texts or degrade the profession in some manner. These texts are frequently described, by editors and scholars of medieval English literature, as “conventional.” Usually discussion stops there, as if the conventional were simply meaningless.

Trugoy the Dove's group, De La Soul, was big in the 1990s, and has been struggling since. “Nowadays,” he goes on,

Is Trugoy indulging in a conventional rhetorical exercise devoid of historical relevance designed to convince the reader of his music's superiority? Some inquiries among rap-friendly students quickly establish that the music, and its audience, have indeed changed; De La Soul's kind of rap belongs to an older, less commercialized, and less verbally defiant generation.

This modern example adds support to my working hypothesis; along with its rhetorical effects, the misperformance topos in medieval English literature often also reflects some historic shift or tension in the nature of performance and audience. In no case, unfortunately, do we have sufficient data to reconstruct the precise historical context, as I could do so easily with rap. But it takes only a little investigation to discover that these “conventional” complaints actually occur only sporadically in England, over an extended period, and by no means simply parrot the French cognates or each other. I would argue, instead, that each misperformance topos presents an author responding vigorously to some stimulus in his or her particular historical, linguistic, and literary environment. While I cannot fill in all the gaps in the views projected by these texts, I hope at least to reframe the inquiry.