Arnaut Daniel (fl. c.1180-95). Troubadour and impoverished minor nobleman from the Périgord. His 18 or 19 surviving songs are among the most virtuoso of the whole troubadour tradition; they were praised for their ‘rare rhymes’ in his vida, for their craftsmanship by Dante. Composing exclusively on the theme of love, Arnaut specialized in interweaving different registers of language—religious, technical, erotic, even comic—to produce a rich and initially somewhat impenetrable text whose artfulness was further enhanced by outrageously ambitious metrical schemes.

[Sarah Kay]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.