Important Occitan lyric genre which accounts for a large proportion of the surviving troubadour lyric corpus. The word first appears c.1150 to denote poems with a political, satirical, or moralizing theme. Though Marcabru never uses the word to designate his own compositions, he is clearly a key figure in the development of the genre. Whereas it appears to have been a point of honour for troubadours to find an original rhyme scheme for a canso, sirventes frequently use the rhyme scheme and tune of other poems, often cansos.
Sirventes are often highly polemic and overtly slanderous. Many of the best-known troubadours composed sirventes as well as cansos, e.g. Peire d'Alvernhe and Giraut de Bornelh; some troubadours were obviously more at home in the genre than in any other, e.g. Bertran de Born and Peire Cardenal. Many sirventes seem impenetrable to the modern reader (particularly without a good critical edition) as they depend on precise topical allusions, but some of the finest troubadour songs are sirventes rather than cansos, and later medieval readers, such as Dante, for whom the topical allusions must also have been opaque, clearly appreciated sirventes as much as love poetry. Some sirventes by trobairitz survive.
[Simon Gaunt]
