One of the remarkable features of Occitan culture is its precocious production of vernacular treatises on vernacular grammar and poetics. The earliest, the Razos de trobar by the Catalan Raimon Vidal de Besalú, dates from around the end of the twelfth century, two hundred years before anything equivalent appears in French.¹ The word razos has many meanings, including “explanation,” “theme,” “speech,” “proportion,” as well as “reason”;² but I believe we should take the reference to “reason” seriously and understand his title to mean “Rational principles of poetic composition.” Such a conjunction of razos with trobar may have struck Raimon’s contemporaries...

In the opening lines of Abril issi’ e mays intrava (April was ending and May beginning) its first-person narrator, whom we take to be Raimon Vidal, is alone in the square of Besalú when a young joglar approaches. The young man wants his older colleague’s advice because, he complains, today’s courts are so much less receptive to troubadour poetry than those of the past. He launches into a rather rambling anecdote about the hospitality he enjoyed at the court of the poet and patron Count Dalfi d’Alvernha (ca. 1160–1235), into which is set another tale, told to him by...

By 1219 Uc de Saint Circ, troubadour and scholar, had left his home in the Quercy to live in the Marca Treviziana in the north of the Veneto. Although he may have paid several visits to the Midi over the next de cades, he remained active mainly in the north of Italy and was last heard of there in 1257.¹

It is fair to say that no one cared much about Uc’s whereabouts until recent scholarship revealed the importance of his Italian activity. His forty-four or so songs of various genres had never struck anyone as better than stilted, and...

Master Ferrarino, an early fourteenth-century lawyer from Ferrara, boasts of consigning to oblivion the parts of songs that he does not select for inclusion in his anthology, confident that a song’s essential sentenças can be captured in only a few of its stanzas.¹ A 226-item florilegium based on his collection makes up the section of chansonnier D known as Dc.² His vida, preserved solely as a preface to this anthology, explains his procedure: “ He made a selection from all the songs of the best troubadours in the world and from each canso or sirventes he drew one or two...

Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole, also known as the Roman de la rose, boasts the innovation that within it are included numerous lyric pieces.¹ The Introduction compared this practice of lyric insertion, typical of Northern French romance, with that of lyric quotation found among Occitania’s Mediterranean neighbors. The comparison is important, because lyric insertion is the point where the nightingales’ way comes closest to the use of quotation on that of the parrots. This chapter exploits their proximity to bring out their difference.

In the nightingales’ mode of lyric reception, the desire to repeat the first person of troubadour poetry...

If Guillaume de Dole maps the nightingales’ way, two hilarious Occitan short stories can be read as a response to the issues raised by the parroting on which the Mediterranean transmission relies. Las novas del papagai (Tale of the parrot) and Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plazer (Brother of Joy and Sister of Pleasure) both present a male protagonist largely overshadowed by a talking bird, which serves as his factotum, especially in situations requiring diplomacy and courtship. The parrot that sweet-talks a lady into an erotic rendezvous with the knight Antiphanor in the Papagai (ca. 1250) may cut a...

The chapters that make up the final part of this book study texts in which the use of quotation elaborates and transforms the pioneering models explored in Chapters 1 to 4 (and reflected on in Chapters 5 and 6). This chapter is about quotations from the troubadours in other Occitan lyrics.

Although it is not uncommon for songs to reprise elements of other songs and to quote parts of lines from them, especially their incipits,¹ verbatim quotation of a whole line or more is rare. In Die Dialektik des Trobars, his exhaustive study of allusions between troubadours, Jörn Gruber identifies...

Like Raimon Vidal counseling the young joglar in Abril issia, a text he certainly knew since he quotes from it,¹ Matfre Ermengau presents himself as writing at the request of his fellow troubadours in Béziers. But Matfre’s response when asked to explain the true nature of love is on a different scale from Raimon’s on court performance. His misleadingly named Breviari d’amor (Concise compendium of love) is one of the most ambitious vernacular texts of the Middle Ages, a vast verse encyclopedia about God, creation, and the nature of humankind, which remains unfinished at around 35,000 lines. Its unifying theme...

The tradition of troubadour quotation sheds new light on the old topic of Dante and the troubadours.¹ Take the recurrent questions of how well and in what form Dante knew the troubadours. At different extremes, Marianne Shapiro quotes with approval Santangelo’s Dante e i trovatori provenzali for suggesting that Dante’s knowledge is heavily mediated by the Occitan treatises and biographical texts, whereas Maurizio Perugi thinks that Dante’s phraseology is everywhere permeated by reminiscences of Arnaut Daniel’s songs.² The debate is framed in such a way as to make it seem demeaning to Dante to suggest that he drew on the...

So far this book has shown quotation from the troubadours to be an engine of cultural change that works in two interconnected ways. It can draw Occitan poetry into the orbit of the school teaching of grammatica, which in the Middle Ages denotes both a discipline (grammar) and the language (Latin) to which it was addressed; and it can privilege this poetry as a source of social, moral, and even redemptive insight, and as a test of those of its readers. Many of the works that quote the troubadours have analogues in the Latin schoolroom, and this is particularly true...

At the foot of the first folio of Occitan chansonnier H someone has written: “Dreitz e raizon quieu chant em demori” (It is rightful and reasonable that I should sing and take my ease), and immediately below it the Italian translation: “Dritto e ragion chio canti e mi soggiorno.” Maria Careri has identified the hand as that of Giovanni Maria Barbieri (1519–74), a noted scholar of the medieval lyric.¹ She thinks he jotted down the line as a reminder to himself to look for it in the chansonnier. His search will have been unsuccessful: the not especially distinguished song...