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A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word troubadour is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz.
Peire Cardenal was a troubadour known for his satirical sirventes and his dislike of the clergy. Ninety-six pieces of his remain, a number rarely matched by other poets of the age.
Na Castelloza was a noblewoman and trobairitz from Auvergne.
The trobairitz were Occitan female troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, active from around 1170 to approximately 1260. Trobairitz is both singular and plural.
The Comtessa de Dia, possibly named Beatritz or Isoarda, was a trobairitz.
Raimon Vidal de Bezaudu(n) (Catalan: Ramon Vidal de Besalú) (flourished early 13th century) was a Catalan troubadour from Besalú. He is notable for authoring the first tract in a Romance language (Occitan) on the subject of grammar and poetry, the Razós de trobar (c. 1210), a title which translates as "Reasons (or Guidelines) of troubadour composition". He began his career as a joglar and he spent his formative years at the court of Hug de Mataplana, which he often recalls fondly in his poems and songs.
Na Gormonda de Monpeslier or Montpelher was a trobairitz from Montpellier in Languedoc. Her lone surviving work, a sirventes, has been called "the first French political poem by a woman."
Raimon de Cornet was a fourteenth-century Toulousain priest, friar, grammarian, poet, and troubadour. He was a prolific author of verse; more than forty of his poems survive, most in Occitan but two in Latin. He also wrote letters, a didactic poem, a grammar, and some treatises on computation. He was the "last of the troubadours" and represented l'esprit le plus brillant of the "Toulousain School". He appears in contemporary documents with the titles En and Frare.
Bertran Folcon d'Avignon or Bertran Folco d'Avinhon was a Provençal nobleman and troubadour from Avignon. He was a faithful partisan of Raymond VI and Raymond VII of Toulouse in Provence, and participated in the wars against the Albigensian Crusade. He was inside the city during the siege of Beaucaire in 1216. In 1226 Raymond VII appointed him bailiff of Avignon.
Rostanhde Merguas was a minor late thirteenth-century Provençal troubadour from the Vaucluse. He may be the troubadour described in the table of contents of chansonnier C, a fourteenth-century Occitan manuscript, as an escudier de la Ylha. He is ascribed one canso. He was at one point assigned the song Non sai cal conseilh mi prenda, but this is the work of Cadenet. Rostanh is called de Melies in the rubric of chansonnier H.
Tribolet was an obscure troubadour, known only for one song, the obscene Us fotaires que no fo amoros. The song's rubric was read as t'bolet by Giulio Bertoni, who identified its composer as Tremoleta, but Alfred Jeanroy suggested the reading "Tribolet", which is widely accepted. He also suggested that the composition attributed to him is a parody of a piece now lost. The song is preserved in one chansonnier (G, folio 128) dating from the final third of the thirteenth century, the same period in which the song may have been written.
A salut d'amor or (e)pistola ("epistle") was an Occitan lyric poem of the troubadours, written as a letter from one lover to another in the tradition of courtly love. Some songs preserved in the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento chansonniers are labelled in the rubrics as saluts, but the salut is not treated as a genre by medieval Occitan grammarians. The trouvères copied the Occitan song style into Old French as the salut d'amour. There are a total of nineteen surviving Occitan saluts and twelve French ones, with a Catalan examples also.
Matfre Ermengau was a Franciscan friar, legist, and troubadour from Béziers. He had a master of laws degree.
Tomida femina is the earliest surviving poem in Occitan, a sixteen-line charm probably for the use of midwives. It is preserved in the left and bottom margins of a Latin legal treatise in a ninth- or tenth-century manuscript, where it is written upside down. Line 14 is missing, but has been supplied by the editors on the basis of the pattern of the final three lines. It has been edited and translated into English by William Doremus Paden and Frances Freeman Paden:
Las, qu'i non sun sparvir, astur, which translates "Oh, to be a sparrow-hawk, a goshawk!", is the incipit of an anonymous Old Occitan cobla. It was found in the margins of an eleventh-century manuscript in the British Library. Possibly it was added late in that century, certainly by a German scribe. It was first published in 1984, and has been translated into French and English.
Bonfilh or Bonfils was a Jewish troubadour from Narbonne. He is the only known Jew who wrote in the troubadour style and language, Old Occitan. His only known work is a partimen (debate) with Guiraut Riquier, Auzit ay dir, Bofil, que saps trobar. It has been suggested that Bonhilh may have been a poetic invention of Guiraut and not a historical person, or that he was the same person as the Jewish poet Abraham Bedersi. There is a lacuna in the only surviving manuscript version of this song that lasts from the middle of the third stanza through to the middle of the fifth. The seventh stanza is also missing the ending of its final line. Each stanza has eight lines, but the last two are tornadas of four each.
O Maria, Deu maire is an Old Occitan song, a hymn to the Virgin Mary, unique in being both the only song from the Saint Martial school that is entirely in the vernacular and the only medieval Occitan song with extant musical notation for all its (twelve) stanzas. It dates to the 1090s and is preserved in MS f. lat. 1139 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It has been translated into English.
Isaac Gorni was a late thirteenth-century Hebrew lyric poet from Aire-sur-l'Adour in Gascony, then ruled by the English Prince Edward. Isaac probably left Gascony before the Jews were expelled by a royal edict of 1287, perhaps in 1275, 1281, or 1282, when heavy taxes were collected from the Jews. His surname derives from the Hebrew goren, "threshing floor", the Occitan for which is aire, as in his birthplace.
Amanieu de la Broqueira was a Gascon troubadour. His name suggests he was from Labroquère, near Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. He wrote two cansos that have been preserved in the 14th-century troubadour chansonnier E :
The serena is a minor Old Occitan lyric genre. Despite the name, it is not a serenade. Rather, it is a counterpart to the alba. In an alba, the lover laments the coming of the dawn that forces lovers to part. In the serena, the lover complains of the long wait for evening to arrive so he can consummate his love. The genre was invented late in the history of the Occitan lyric by the troubadour Guiraut Riquier in his song Ad un fin aman fon datz, which he claimed to have completed in the year 1263, when he was living in Narbonne. The refrain of Guiraut's serena goes:
References
- Frank M. Chambers (1985), An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification (Diane Publishing).
- W. D. Paden and F. F. Paden (2007), Troubadour Poems from the South of France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer).
