Studying the medieval prosimetrum, a genre that mixes narrative with lyric, could have important ramifications for the general study of poetics. By disrupting transhistorical theories of the lyric, which proceed from a presumed continuity between ancient Greece and modernity, the prosimetrum situates the Middle Ages at the center of our understanding of modern lyric poetry. Instead of beginning with a late-eighteenth-century understanding of lyric poetry as a self-expressive voice, which scholars must then localize in a poem's historical conditions, language, and genres, the prosimetrum begins with a conventional, rhetorical poem in a variety of stated genres and then, by including a narrative frame, stages that poem as a heartfelt song sung by lovesick knights or clerks. In the prosimetrum, the playful game of conventional art, which defines the medieval love lyric in isolation, suddenly becomes a way to imagine fictional subjectivities.