Medieval Occitan lyric genre (the word means ‘chanson’). Early troubadours like Guilhem IX and Marcabru refer to their compositions indiscriminately as vers, but from about 1150 troubadours distinguish between cansos, sirventes, and other genres. Approximately half of the extant corpus of troubadour lyrics are cansos. Originally set to music, cansos are devoted exclusively to singing about fin'amor. They are generally composed of between four and eight stanzas (coblas) of the same length and form and one or more shorter stanzas which replicate a part of the form of the other stanzas (envois or tornadas). Though some cansos have relatively straightforward rhyme-schemes, some are metrically extremely complex. A common metaphor in cansos equates the quality of a troubadour's love with the quality of his poetry, and troubadours like Arnaut Daniel took pride in inventing demanding metrical forms which show off their technical skills. Cansos are often densely metaphorical and highly conventional, giving them an abstract flavour to the modern reader; they rarely reveal the identity of the lady to whom they are ostensibly addressed. The canso was clearly a very popular form throughout Europe; the Occitan genre certainly had a profound influence on the love poetry of the Northern French trouvères, on the German Minnesingers, and on Italian poets like Dante and Petrarch.
[Simon Gaunt]
