12th- and 13th-c. didactic poems in Occitan. An ensenhamen is usually written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets and ostensibly addressed to a social group: e.g. courtly ladies, damsels, knights, or jongleurs. The behaviour prescribed for courtly men and women in the ensenhamens is suspiciously similar to that required of their counterparts in the courtly canso; the ensenhamens probably tell us more about literary ideals than life at the courts where they circulated. The repeated insistence, in the ensenhamens, on generosity to poets and jongleurs probably indicates wishful thinking on the part of their authors; in the 13th c. their popularity appears to be due primarily to nostalgia for a golden age of courtly poetry. The related Old French enseignements, written by poets like Robert de Blois, are possibly more realistic than the ensenhamens, but even these are highly stylized, clearly conflating literary paradigms with historical reality. The early ensenhamen Cabra juglar, by Guiraut de Cabrera, a contemporary of Marcabru's, purports to instruct a jongleur on the texts he should have in his repertoire; it is one of our best sources of information on literary culture in Occitania in the first half of the 12th c. The ensenhamens have been published in
[Simon Gaunt]
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
