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Occitania, known today as the "south of France," had its own language and culture in the Middle Ages. Its troubadours created "courtly love" and a new poetic language in the vernacular, which were to influence European literature for centuries. There are many books on the troubadours, but this is the first comprehensive study of the society in which they lived. For readers of literature it offers a wide-ranging insight into the realities that lay behind the poetic mystique. For historians it opens up an important and neglected area of medieval Europe.
The love songs of Occitan troubadours inspired a rich body of courtly lyric by poets working in neighboring languages. For Sarah Kay, these poets were nightingales, composing verse that is recognizable yet original. But troubadour poetry also circulated across Europe in a form that is less well known but was more transformative. Writers outside Occitania quoted troubadour songs word for word in their original language, then commented upon these excerpts as linguistic or poetic examples, as guides to conduct, and even as sources of theological insight. If troubadours and their poetic imitators were nightingales, these quotation artists were parrots, and their practices of excerption and repet...
This book is a reference volume and a digest of more than a century of scholarly work on troubadour poetry. Written by leading scholars, it summarizes the current consensus on the various facets of troubadour studies. Standing at the beginning of the history of modern European verse, the troubadours were the prime poets and composers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the South of France. No study of medieval literature is complete without an examination of the courtly love which is celebrated in the elaborately rhymed stanzas of troubadour verse, creations whose words and melodies were imitated by poets and musicians all over medieval Europe. The words of about 2,500 troubadour song...
A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these seemingly peripheral figures were keenly involved with all aspects of late medieval communities. Minstrels were a common sight and sound in the late Middle Ages. Aristocrats, knights and ladies heard them on great occasions (such as Edward I's wedding feast for his daughter Elizabeth in 1296) and in quieter moments in their chambers; town-dwellers heard and saw them in civic processions (when their sound drew attention to the spectacle); and even in the countryside people heard them at weddings, church-ales and other parish celebrations. But who were the minstr...
The first known troubadour, Guilhem IX of Aquitaine, VII Count of Poitou, was a versatile man who fought against the Moors in Spain, lost an army on his way to the First Crusade, and for a time, like his great-grandson Richard Cœur de Lion, possessed more land and power in France than the king himself. His poetry reflects the hatred of convention and love of the unexpected that marks his life. In its easy swing between self-mockery and seriousness, idealised love and bawdy laughter, it introduces into troubadour poetry a sense of conflict which, after Guilhem's death in 1127, found a different and wider expression in an opposition between the metaphysical poetry of troubadours who sang with 'dark', 'rich' words and the love songs of poets who composed in a clear, 'easy' style on the single plane of their courtly experience. Dr Topsfield examines the work of a number of the greatest troubadours from the viewpoint of their attitudes to love.
Amongst the troubadour poets, Giraut de Borneil was one of the most important and influential. This 1989 edition covers Giraut's entire output.
The Death of the Troubadour offers new insight into the emergence of the autonomous "self," which has often been taken as a marker of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. Gregory B. Stone argues that the anonymity of late medieval texts, and specifically of the troubadour song, is not a sign of naïveté but rather that of a mature, deliberate resistance to the advent of individualism. Moreover, this anonymity reveals that medieval lyric, with a melancholy knowledge of the inevitable triumph of the specific over the general, of private over public subjectivity, lurks at the heart of narrative, ready to wield a retributive violence. Through a series of detailed rea...
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.