Troubadours

Poets composing in medieval Occitan and, more narrowly, composers of Occitan lyric poetry, troubadours are the precursors of the northern French trouvéres. They were musicians and performers as well as poets. Troubadours came to be associated with all the major courts of Occitania, and were also in demand in the courts of Spain, Portugal, northern Italy, England, and northern France. Although less than half of their surviving compositions deal with love, it is to the troubadours that we owe the earliest literature of fin'amor and the promotion of an ideal of cortezia, or ‘courtliness’ [see Courtoisie].

The earliest known troubadour, Guilhem IX (1071-1126), established the importance of Poitou and Aquitaine as a centre of patronage, and the next generation of known troubadours (including Marcabru, Cercamon, Jaufre Rudel) all had some degree of dependence on his successor, Guilhem X. The ‘generation of 1170’ (so called because in that year the troubadour Peire d'Alvernhe composed a song, each of whose 12 stanzas sketches a satirical portrait of a fellow poet) numbers some of the most famous troubadours: Bernart de Ventadorn, Giraut de Bornelh, Raimbaut d'Aurenga. In fact, the careers of several of these poets overlapped with that of Marcabru, at least; and in their works, which should often be read as interventions in a discussion rather than as isolated pieces, questions of love and poetic style are vigorously debated. The development of individual and even idiosyncratic views on these issues characterizes the next wave of major poets, all of whom have left substantial œuvres: Gaucelm Faidit, Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, Peire Vidal, Raimon de Miraval. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-c.1229) [see Cathars] prompted poetry of a different, more satirical or nostalgic cast, by such troubadours as Peire Cardenal and Guilhem de Montanhagol. Giraut Riquier (c.1230-1292) is usually thought of as ‘the last of the troubadours’.

Although deriving from a wide range of social backgrounds, troubadours composed in the context of aristocratic courts, either because (like Guilhem IX, Jaufre Rudel, Raimbaut d'Aurenga, or Bertran de Born) they presided over one themselves or because they had court employment of some sort. We have the names of 460 persons held to have composed lyric poetry in Occitan, and, according to Istvan Frank's Répertoire métrique (1953-7), 2, 542 works survive that can be attributed to some 350 troubadours, a few of whom were women poets (or trobairitz). Individual poems of the troubadours are identified by the number assigned to them in Pillet and Carsten's Bibliographie der Trobadours (1933). [See Lyric Poetry, I].

[Sarah Kay]

Bibliography

• M. de Riquer, Los Trovadores: historia literaria y textos, 3 vols. (1975)
• L. T. Topsfield, Troubadours and Love (1975)
• L. M. Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence (1975)