BARDS | MINSTRELS | TROUBADOURS

Troubadours and Trouveres were lyric poets or poet-musicians of France in the 12th and 13th centuries. It is customary to describe as troubadours those poets who worked in the south of France and wrote in Provencal, the langue d'oc, whereas the trouveres worked in the north of France and wrote in French, the langue d'oil.

The first centre of troubadour song seems to have been Poitiers, but the main area extended from the Atlantic coast south of Bordeaux in the west, to the Alps bordering on Italy in the east. There were also 'schools' of troubadours in northern Italy itself and in Catalonia. Their influence, ofcourse, spread much more widely. In the Bibliographie of Pillet and Carstens, 460 troubadours are named; about 2600 of their poems survive, with melodies for rougly one in ten.

Image of Jaufre Rudel and the Countess of Tripoli The romantic idea of the troubadour current in the 19th century is slowly fading before a more careful and realisitc appraisal built up by scholars over the years. Far from being a carefree vagabond 'warbling his native woodnotes wild', the troubadour was a characteristically serious, well-educated, and highly sophisticated verse-technician. Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, generally described as 'the first of the troubadours' was a duke, and his granddaughter, Eleanor of Aquitain, married first King Louis VII of France, and soon afterwards Henry of Anjou, later Henry II of England.

The art of the troubadours was one in which music and poetry were combined in the service of the courtly ideal, the ideal of fin'amours (refined love). Their repertories of poetry were very self- conscious, and the discussion of technique played an important part in the poems themselves. For sheer virtuosity, the poets surpass all other lyric poets of the Middle Ages, with the possible exception of Dante.

BARDS | MINSTRELS | TROUBADOURS

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