The Troubadour Tensos and Partimens


Book Description




The Troubadours


Book Description

The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.




The Troubadour Tensos and Partimens [3 Volume Set]


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A major contribution to knowledge of medieval Occitan literature. Best known for their love-songs and invention of Courtly Love, the troubadours were also fascinated by debate. Like their contemporaries throughout the medieval world who sharpened their wit and intellect on scholastic disputations, the troubadours devised their entire, multifaceted lyric production on the basis of many forms of dialogue: intertextual debates, satirical challenges, self-questioning, mini-dramas. This debating process is nowhere more in evidence than in the troubadour tensos and partimens. This 3 volume critical edition makes available for the first time the massive corpus of 160 tensos and partimens involving real speakers.They supply a mine of new information on the medieval Occitan language, contemporary politics, courtly and judicial mores, and attitudes to gender, class, and ethnic stereotypes, often presenting a picture of courtly life, love and sexual relations very different from that of the better-known love-lyric. The edition meets the highest standards of scholarly rigour: the notes and critical apparatus are as minimal as scholarly probity allows but alwayshelpful and well-argued, taking due account of previous scholarship, and the translations clear, accurate and elegant. A cumulative index, bibliography and glossary aid access to these volumes which fill one of the last major gapsin our knowledge of medieval Occitan literature. RUTH HARVEY is Professor of medieval Occitan literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; LINDA PATERSON is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Warwick. They were assisted by Anna Radaelli.




A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Troubadours and Old Occitan Literature


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Although it seemed in the mid-1970s that the study of the troubadours and of Occitan literature had reached a sort of zenith, it has since become apparent that this moment was merely a plateau from which an intensive renewal was being launched. In this new bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature, Robert Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the fifteenth-century works of Occitano-Catalan poet Jordi de Sant Jordi - and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor includes articles on related topics such as practical approaches to the language of the troubadours and the musicology of select troubadour songs, as well as articles situated within sociology, religious history, critical methodology, and psychoanalytical analysis. Each listing offers descriptive comments on the scholarly contribution of each source to Occitan literature, with remarks on striking or controversial content, and numerous cross-references that identify complementary studies and differing opinions. Taylor's painstaking attention to detail and broad knowledge of the field ensure that this guide will become the essential source for Occitan literary studies worldwide.




The Troubadours


Book Description

An engaging and accessible introduction to the music, poetry, and lives of the medieval singer-songwriters. Composing songs of love and war in medieval Western and Southern Europe, troubadours spanned the social spectrum from powerful nobles to penniless minstrels. This book delves into the everyday worlds of these remarkable poet-musicians, famed for their innovative use of language and music as well as the lasting impact of their work on audiences then and now. The troubadours’ songs explored ideas about courtly love as well as medieval perceptions of gender, class, war, and chivalry. Linda M. Paterson examines the troubadours’ music, performance, and legacy, pairing fresh translations with the original texts to highlight the enduring beauty of their songs and poetry.




The Jews of Provence and Languedoc


Book Description

This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence over some 1,500 years of cultural florescence with far-reaching consequences. A seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.




Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said


Book Description

A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor—gossip often qualified by the curious phrase “it was said,” or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired. While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveals about this queen and life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. She reads the Middle Ages, not to impose our current conceptual categories on its culture, but to expose the conceptual categories medieval women used to make sense of their lives. Along the way, Sullivan paints a fresh portrait of this singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world.




Culture and Society in Medieval Occitania


Book Description

Medieval Occitania, a geographical and linguistic area often referred to as 'the South of France', 'the South', 'the Midi', or more loosely 'Provence', was politically diverse but culturally coherent. It was here that the troubadours created Courtly Love and a new poetic language, which together were to affect the whole course of European literature and sensibilities. The essays made readily accessible in this collection reflect the author's many-sided interests in the troubadours and the society from which they sprang: the historical and cultural place of the women forming the ostensible objects of their desire, veneration, or anxieties; the extent to which French notions of chivalry penetrated the South; the nature and meaning of various elements of court culture; the precocious development of medical science in this region; its complex responses to the Crusades; and the question of Occitan identity. Mostly complementing her major publications (The World of the Troubadours, collaborative editions of the songs of the troubadour Marcabru, of the epic fragment the Canso d'Antioca, and of the medieval Occitan tensos and partimens), they provide either more detailed material than found its way into those works, or developments from them. 'Occitan literature and the Holy Land' anticipates a new project on responses to the Crusades in Occitan and Old French lyrics.




Parrots and Nightingales


Book Description

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 repetition brought about changes in poetic subjectivity that would deeply affect the European canon. The first sustained study of the medieval tradition of troubadour quotation, Parrots and Nightingales examines texts produced along the arc of the northern Mediterranean—from Catalonia through southern France to northern Italy—through the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth. Featuring extensive appendices of over a thousand troubadour passages that have been quoted or anthologized, Parrots and Nightingales traces how quotations influenced the works of grammarians, short story writers, biographers, encyclopedists, and not least, other poets including Dante and Petrarch. Kay explores the instability and fluidity of medieval textuality, revealing how the art of quotation affected the transmission of knowledge and transformed perceptions of desire from the "courtly love" of the Middle Ages to the more learned formulations that emerged in the Renaissance. Parrots and Nightingales deftly restores the medieval tradition of lyric quotation to visibility, persuasively arguing for its originality and influence as a literary strategy.




Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle


Book Description

In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, contributors from musicology, literary studies, history, and art history provide an account of the works of 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle, one of the first named authors of medieval vernacular music for whom a complete works manuscript survives. The essays illuminate Adam’s generic transformations in polyphony, drama, debate poetry, and other genres, while also emphasizing his place in a large community of trouvères active in the bustling urban environment of Arras. Exploring issues of authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the material contexts of his works, and his influence on later generations, this book provides the most complete and up-to-date picture available in English of Adam’s œuvre. Contributors are Alain Corbellari, Mark Everist, Anna Kathryn Grau, John Haines, Anne Ibos-Augé, Daniel E. O’Sullivan, Judith A. Peraino, Isabelle Ragnard, Jennifer Saltzstein, Alison Stones, Carol Symes, and Eliza Zingesser.




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