The troubadours were poets and musicians who
became common in the south of France during the
early 12th century. Like the medieval jongleur, or
minstrel, troubadours traveled widely, but unlike
the minstrels, troubadours composed and performed
their own work. They wrote in a medieval
language called Provençal, today called Occitan,
and their lyrics resembled modern song lyrics in
that they were meant to be sung to musical accompaniment.
While most of the poets known to us
were male, there were also female troubadours
called trobairitz. The trouvères, the northern
French counterparts of the troubadours, borrowed
their ideas and techniques from the southern troubadours.
The troubadour style flourished over a span of
about 200 years. The early troubadours first appeared
in the first half of the 12th century in the
province of Poitiers. From 1150 to 1180, they prospered
under the patronage of Eleanor of Aquitaine,
and in the years 1180–1209, the troubadour fashion
reached courts in Italy, Spain, Hungary, and
even Malta.With the beginning of the Albigensian
CRUSADE (1208), however, the interest in courtly
poetry began to decline, especially when troubadours
lost their wealthy patrons, and religious fervor
began to supplant earthly love as the popular
theme for poetry. By the late 13th century, devotional
songs addressed the Virgin Mary rather than
mortal women, and the troubadours effectively
disappeared.
The most important contribution the troubadours
and trobairitz made to Western literature
was their evolution of the concept of courtly love,
or fin’ amor (“fine love”). Courtly love, part of the
code of CHIVALRY, concerned the worship of a noble
woman by a poet who made himself a servant to
love. This concept profoundly affected later MEDIEVAL
ROMANCE, as seen in the works of such authors
as CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, MARIE DE FRANCE, and
JEAN DE MEUN, as well as in stories about King
Arthur and the HOLY GRAIL.While the style of troubadour
poetry might be either light and courtly or
brooding and reflective, the poems frequently use
and reuse certain images, devices, and conventions
to describe the poet’s experience of love and life.
Many of the troubadour manuscripts contain
short sections called vidas (from the Latin vita
“life”) that serve as a brief biography prefacing the
poet’s songs. Troubadours could be of any class,
from noble to peasant, and in the 13th century
troubadours frequented courts all over western
Europe, from Portugal to the Holy Land. Since it is
difficult to know whether the poet or another authored
the vidas, it is virtually impossible to determine
how much is factually true and how much
was added to create interest. Several of the vidas
serve as touching narratives that could stand as
separate pieces of literature.
Critical Analysis
Troubadour poetry could address a variety of topics
or take on any number of forms. The vers was
often a moralizing poem, and the sirventes was a
poem of blame or praise, frequently about deeds of
war. The tenso was a debate poem that staged an
argument between two or more parties; the alba
was a song addressed to the dawn; the pastorela,
based on the Greek pastoral image, involved the
love affairs of shepherds and shepherdesses; and
the planh was a lament on the death of a king or
other important personage.
By far the most prevalent and influential of the
genres was the canso, the song about love. In their
treatments of love, troubadours often drew on biblical
sources but also borrowed classical tropes from
love poets such as OVID. From this they developed a
concept of courtly love with very specific rules. The
poet is invariably in love with a noble lady or
domna, a situation innovated by William IX,Count
of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine (born 1071), the
earliest recorded troubadour. The lady is portrayed
as possessing refined manners and speech and surpassing
beauty.William writes, “[f]or the sweetness
of her welcome, for her beautiful and gentle
look . . . a man who wins to the joy of her love will
live a hundred years.” To love the lady is the chief
joy of the poet’s life. As William says:
“The joy of her can make the sick man well
again, her wrath can make a well man die. . . .”
The French troubadour Marcabru (fl. ca. 1130–56),
supports this notion that love is the pursuit of the
poet’s life, singing: “He whom noble Love singles
out lives gay, courtly and wise; and he whom it rejects,
it confounds, and commits to total destruction.”
And Arnaut Daniel declares that he prefers
his lady’s love to any of earth’s highest honors: “I’d
not have the empire of Rome, nor be made pope of
it, if thereby I might not return to her for whom my
heart burns and crackles.”
But the lady whom the poet adores is married,
so the lover can only long for her from a distance,
which produces an understandable state of distress.
Equally distressing to the lover is the lady’s
behavior, which according to the rules of courtly
love may be gracious or distant by turns. Sometimes
she will treat him with warm affection,
sometimes with icy disdain, and she may destroy
his heart by faithlessly giving herself to another.
Additionally, the lover may suffer from competitors’
slanders, all of which add a tone of lament to
the poetry. As Peire VIDAL complains, “No more
than the fish can live without water, love-service
cannot be without slanderers, hence lovers pay
dearly for their joy.”
When not complaining of the lady’s coldness or
infidelity, the lover in the poem frequently begs
for her attention and love, as in these lines by Italian
troubadour Sordello (ca. 1200–ca. 1269): “For
Pity’s sake I pray you, fair beloved, that with some
little crumb of love’s joy you come to my help,
swiftly. . . . For otherwise I can have no joy, unless
pity and mercy take you.” In any circumstance, the
pursuit of his lady causes the poet to suffer. Thus,
love is the highest and most astonishing experience
of which the human being is capable.
The female trobairitz, though addressing male
lovers, use the same stylistic techniques and express
the same sentiments of courtly love. For example,
the Countess of Dia sings of her fidelity to
her lover and her joy in love:
. . . my love for him has never strayed,
nor is my heart the straying kind.
I’m very happy, for the man
whose love I seek’s so fine.
In another verse, she expresses a bitter lament over
her lover’s coldness and lack of faith:
. . . I feel your heart turn adamant
toward me, friend: it’s not right another
love
take you away from me, no matter what she
says.
The clear style, pitch of feeling, and complexity
of emotion achieved in troubadour lyrics helps explain
why, when blended with skillful melodies,
these songs pleased audiences for so long and
gained the poet noble favor above all other entertainers
at court.
Though the early troubadour poetry reveals inventive
experimentation with topics and images,
later troubadour poetry became rather formulaic
in its adherence to certain devices, such as the love
triangle, the feeling that there is no joy above that
of loving another, and the lover’s long suffering
marked by periodic bursts of happiness. Though
troubadours eventually disappeared, their code of
courtly love persisted in medieval literature
through the late MIDDLE AGES into the Renaissance
and beyond, appearing in such works as Ludovico
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Book of the Duchess, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
d’Arthur, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene.Writers of later ages and nationalities continued
to elaborate on and improve the tradition
of lyric love poetry: the Italians DANTE and Petrarch,
the French François Villon and Pierre de
Ronsard, the Spanish Miguel Cervantes and Luis
de Góngora, the German minnesingers, and English
poets from William Shakespeare to John
Donne, to name only a few. As translator Alan
Press says, “the work of the troubadours lies at the
origin of a centuries-long tradition of high lyric
poetry in western Europe.” In effect, the troubadours
created and communicated to the rest of Europe
an original way of composing poetry and
talking about love whose forms and language have
survived in Western culture to the present day.
English Versions of Works by Troubadours
Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry. Translated and
edited by Alan R. Press.Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1971.
Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours. Scarborough,
U.K.: Paddington Press Ltd., 1976.
Works about Troubadours
Gaunt, Simon and Sarah Kay, eds. The Troubadours:
An Introduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Paterson, Linda A. The World of the Troubadours: Medieval
Occitan Society ca. 1100–ca. 1300. Cambridge,
Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.