SOURCE: Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. Introduction to Songs of the Women Troubadours, edited and translated by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard, and Sarah White, pp. xi-xlvii. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

[In the following essay, Bruckner discusses how the trobairitz altered the prevailing poetic system that was largely shaped by males.]

This collection assembles twenty named women poets and a selection of anonymous domnas, names and voices derived from poems, rubrics, vidas (biographies) and razos (commentaries) recorded in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If they are only twenty or so among more than four hundred named troubadours of Southern France, these women poets, active from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, nevertheless represent an exceptional and exceptionally large group of literary women within medieval tradition. As such, they deserve the attention of a modern public searching for a fuller understanding of the roles men and women have played in the formation of western culture. A modern reader, denied immediate access to the world of the Occitanic courts and their live performances of music and song, necessarily meets troubadours, male and female, in the textual world of medieval chansonniers in which their songs were written down in anthology form. Among the women troubadours named in the manuscripts—all noblewomen as far as their social status can be determined—only Gaudairenca, the wife of Raimon de Miraval, has left no trace in this collection, since her “coblas e dansas” have not survived (Boutière-Schutz 380). Among the anonymous domnas whose status as women poets remains problematic, our selection gives a wide sample of the different voices attributed to female speakers within the context of troubadour lyric. In order to understand and appreciate the accomplishments of these “trobairitz” (the feminine form of “trobador,” according to the thirteenth-century romance Flamenca), we need to situate them and their poems in a variety of contexts, literary and historical, cultural and linguistic.

TROBAIRITZ INTERACTING WITH THE TROUBADOUR POETIC SYSTEM

The trobairitz give precious testimony of the ways aristocratic women in Southern France were able to participate fully in the game and life of poetry, not only as patrons and objects of song but as poets singing and reshaping the art of the troubadours. An art of love that is simultaneously an art of persuasion, troubadour poetry is characterized by a formalization that operates equally at the levels of form and content. If originality and creativity in the Romantic sense are not relevant categories for understanding troubadour lyric, individual invention is no less important here than in other literary forms: the poet “finds” (the normal meaning of trobar) within the shared materials of the poetic system new combinations and variations that continually refract the common traits of the system through a changeable lens of particular manifestations. Any trobairitz who begins to compose (the technical sense of trobar) enters a lyric world that may strike the modern reader as paradoxically open and confining: the choice of shape for stanza and poem—rhymes, rhyme patterns, meter, number of stanzas—is uncharted by any fixed forms like those introduced in the later Middle Ages. Yet the subject matter of a canso (love song) is clearly mapped out by the typical scenarios of fin'amor, in which the humble poet/lover begs for the love of his frequently silent and rejecting lady, describes his pain and suffering through all the ambivalent enjoyment of frustrated desire, and finally expects his service in song to be rewarded by an eventual gift of joi, anticipated (sometimes remembered) in the experience of the song itself. Each repetition of vocabulary, motifs, and themes enriches the power of allusion that key words and concepts infuse into the lyric voice.

Does this mean that troubadour poetry is characterized by formal freedom and thematic constraint? Yes and no, since on the one hand, troubadours frequently borrow and adapt each others' formal choices, creating a series of allusions through rhymes or stanza structures that set up, within the larger probabilities of the system as a whole, a game of recognition and play for the public of connoisseurs. On the other hand, the motifs of love that can be adequately expressed and explored in Bernart de Ventadorn's 2400-word vocabulary (Zumthor, “Recherches” 410-11) can upon occasion be interrupted by the unexpected: in the generally more free-wheeling world of the tenso (debate poem), Alaisina Yselda raises the uncourtly topic of sagging breasts and stretching bellies; attracted to love and marriage, she worries about the inevitable fruits and their effects on her body (no. 27). In the context of the sirventes, where a range of moral and political topics can be explored, the anonymous trobairitz of “Ab greu cossire” (no. 29) rails against the sumptuary laws that have robbed her and other ladies of their gold and silver chains and buttons. Her complaint is no less intensely formulated for all the humorous irony of her tone. Even within the traditional topics of love, the same motifs sung by a troubadour may have a different effect when the lady of lyric begins to sing for herself. If we would join the lyric's public of connoisseurs, it will be equally important to appreciate where the trobairitz do what troubadours do and where they do not, even if sometimes it may be difficult to tell the difference.

Although we are usually reading these poems from a written text with no melody enriching and sustaining the words, we need to keep in mind their intended life in performance and song. We have only a single stanza of one trobairitz melody transcribed in manuscript W, but there is a documented history of women as performers and composers, some professional, others amateur, that covers the whole period of the Middle Ages (Coldwell and Borroff). Until polyphonic music introduced special requirements for training, aristocratic men and women had equal access to composing monophonic music (Coldwell 42-43). How this music was actually performed, with or without musical accompaniment, has long been a subject of speculation. The musical notation of troubadour manuscripts uses notes (neumes) that indicate relative pitch with no measurement of time. However, there is general agreement among scholars and performers that the melodies must be free to adapt themselves to the rhythm of the words, especially as the same melody is repeated from stanza to stanza (Van der Werf). The music in general may be understood to serve the text without obscuring it. Vincent Pollina shows, for example, how the bipartite structure of the musical scheme in the Comtessa de Dia's “A chantar,” ABABCDB, typically reinforces the standard division of the stanza into frons (head, i.e., the two repeated pedes or feet of the opening four verses: here aaaa, frequently abab or abba) and cauda (tail: the second half of the stanza which may be of any length, here bab). Pollina details the interplay of words and melody to demonstrate how both embody the common medieval aesthetic principle of combining continuity and discontinuity (“Melodic Continuity”).

Troubadours did not always make up their own melodies and trobairitz too may have borrowed melodies. That is what Rieger suggests for Maria de Ventadorn's tenso with Gui d'Ussel, “Gui d'Uisel, be.m pesa de vos” (no. 12), since the initiator of the debate is assumed to be responsible for the music as well as the form of the stanza (“La mala canso”). Following the suggestion of a razo (Boutière-Schutz 212-13) that links their tenso to Gui's song of complaint about a “bad lady,” Rieger hypothesizes that Gui's “Si be.m partetz, mala dompna, de vos” plays off against Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's “Ges, si tot ma don'et amors.” Raimbaut's and Gui's songs share the same rhyme scheme and two repeated rhyme words. Since Maria uses the metric pattern, as well as the rhyme scheme of Raimbaut's song (a10 b10 b10 a10 c10 c10 d10 d10) and shares two rhyme sounds with Gui's mala canso (-os and -en), she may very well have borrowed Raimbaut's melody (now lost) to reinforce the pattern of interaction, playing off against the troubadours' complaints about ladies her own argument that a lady should always maintain her superior status.

These examples have already introduced some of the key elements that characterize trobar. Each trobairitz is as free as any troubadour to invent her own shape for the opening stanza (which will set the pattern for the entire song), as Castelloza does in “Amics s'ie.us trobes avinen” (no. 6) and “Ia de chantar” (no. 5) with their unique rhyme schemes and syllabic formulae (Frank 1: 33, 159; 2: 32, 48). That choice may overlap with patterns already used by other troubadours, as when Castelloza's “Mout avetz faich” (no. 7) shares a rhyme scheme with two other cansos, but repeats neither their rhymes nor their metric pattern (Frank 1: 85; 2: 85). The repetitions that result may serve as a possible allusion, whose status needs to be reinforced by other signs inscribed in the poem to permit and invite recognition.

Once the pattern is set in the first stanza, subsequent stanzas (of varying numbers) may repeat it in a variety of ways. In “A chantar,” the Comtessa de Dia uses coblas singulars, that is, the repeats the same rhyme scheme in each strophe, but changes the a rhyme every time (-ia, -enssa, -uoilla, -ina, -atges). Clara d'Anduza composes “En greu esmay” (no. 9) in the more difficult form of coblas unissonans, where the rhyme sounds as well as the pattern must remain the same throughout the song: ababc'ddc' (-en, -or, -ia, -ar). Coblas doblas allow the Comtessa de Dia to associate the stanzas of “Ab ioi” (no. 1) two by two: the rhyme scheme remains constant (ab'ab'b'aab'), while the rhymes change every other stanza (except in the tornada which always repeats whatever portion coincides with the previous stanza). The Comtessa reinforces this pattern of two-by-two when she uses derivative rhyme to link the a and b rhymes through the play of feminine and masculine endings: -ais/-aia in I and II, -en/-ensa in III, IV, and the tornada (this kind of rhyme was much appreciated by the troubadours and put to excellent use by the Comtessa de Dia: see Kay, “Derivation”). The Comtessa contributes further to the play set up in the rhymes by using binomial pairs, a frequent stylistic trait of the troubadours (and of medieval writing in general), here repeated in a crisscrossing pattern that further intertwines the two opening verses of the canso: “Ab ioi et ab ioven m'apais / e iois e iovens m'apaia.” This example notwithstanding, the trobairitz repertoire seems on the whole less marked by the fancy work of metrical variation characteristic of troubadours like Marcabru or Arnaut Daniel. Is this possibly because they arrive later in the tradition and leave fewer cansos behind in the manuscripts that record their compositions? We can only speculate on scant evidence.

Troubadours invented various patterns of rhyme to connect the stanzas in a fixed order, despite the general tendency of these songs to allow a good measure of mouvance, changeability evident in the variants across manuscripts that record the same song with different stanza orders, stylistic variations, etc. (see Van Vleck). “Per ioi que d'amor m'avegna” (no. 8), for example, consists of five coblas unissonans capfinidas; that is, in addition to the repetition of rhyme scheme and rhymes, each stanza is linked to the one that follows it by the reprise of its final word (sometimes in varied form) in the opening verse of the next stanza: “don per mi no.s vol partir. / Partir m'en er …” (I/II); “de leis amar ni servir. / Leis serva …” (II/III); “de vos amar ni grasir. / Grasisc vos …” (III/IV); “c'autra no.m pot enriquir. / Rica soi …” (IV/V). This technical virtuosity is reflected thematically in the opening stanza—the one stanza in the troubadour tradition most likely to remain in place—when the anonymous trobairitz insists on the problematic connections between her love and her song:

Per ioi que d'amor m'avegna
no.m calgra ogan esbaudir,
qu'eu non cre qu'en grat me tegna
cel c'anc non volc hobesir
mos bos motz ni mas chansos;
ni anc no fon lasaz sos
qu'ie.m pogues de lui sofrir.

(1-7)

To delight in any joy that love might bring
will not concern me soon,
for I don't think he holds me dear,
the one who never wishes to obey
my good words or songs;
nor was any music ever woven
that would enable me to do without him.

Troubadours typically link the action of singing to that of loving. The two actions become synonymous, as Bernart de Ventadorn explains in “Non es maravelha s'eu chan,” when he attributes his superiority in song to his superior attraction and obedience to love. The Comtessa de Dia sings likewise: “Fin ioi me dona alegranssa / per qu'eu chan plus gaiamen” (no. 4, 1-2: “Happiness brings me pure joy / which makes me sing more cheerfully”). Just as typically, a troubadour may refuse to stop singing even if his love is not returned, as Gui d'Ussel does in the mala canso just described. In “Per ioi” the anonymous trobairitz uses the technical vocabulary of troubadour lyric to designate the two components, words and song (“mos bos motz ni mas chanssos”), that are laced together (“lasaz”) by her expertise in trobar. What should be produced by the “natural” congruence of joy in love and song is here produced in the negative mode as a complaint against the loved one who refuses to obey her songs and show gratitude for her singing. If he will not respond as he should, she will at least praise her own service in song (“mos bos motz”) and continue to affirm her loyalty even if no joy comes to her from love.

The link between singing and loving is often expressed by troubadours, especially those of the early generations, in the topos of the “springtime opening,” in which the happiness or sadness of the poet responds with particular congruence or opposition to the season and its weather. In a world dominated by the antithesis of joy and suffering (Bec, “L'antithèse”), reversals along positive and negative polarities typically channel the path of variation as much as the individual choice of particular details. In “Ar em al freg temps vengut” (no. 11), one of only two poems by trobairitz that use the springtime opening (see also “Quan vei los praz verdesir” in Rieger), Azalais de Porcairagues describes her disorientation and loss of solace (st. II), negative feelings that accord with the wintry scene she paints in the opening stanza:

Ar em al freg temps vengut
que.l gells e.l neus e la faingna
e.l auçellet estan mut
c'us de chantar non s'afraigna;
e son sec li ram pels plais
que flors ni foilla no.i nais
ni rrossignols no i crida
que l'am' en mai me rreissida.
Now we are come to the cold time
when there's snow and ice and sludge
and the little birds are mute;
not one attempts to sing,
and the boughs are bare in hedges;
neither flower nor leaf is sprouting there,
nor, calling there, the nightingale
who wakes my soul in May.

The last verse evokes the normal setting for springtime, when birdsong and new growth typically parallel the urge to sing felt by the troubadour poet. Here the birds remain silent on dried out branches, when ice and snow and mud replace flowers and leaves: Azalais's description evokes both the positive and negative images of spring, seen through the eyes of winter. She recalls a moment in the past when she has been awakened to love by the call of the nightingale, but now in the “freg temps” a new correspondence appears in the opposite mode: just as winter has reversed the movement of spring, something coming from Aurenga (14) has made her heart fall into disarray and grief.

The use of coblas doblas that appears in stanzas I-IV is itself disrupted by irregularities in the pairing of V and VI (the a and b rhymes do not match, while the c and d rhymes do). Aimo Sakari has speculated that the irregularities result from Azalais's effort to transform a previously written canso (st. III-V) into a planh (lament) for the death of Raimbaut d'Aurenga, with whom she exchanged poems, each designating the other by the senhal (secret name) Joglar (“Azalais” and “Azalais Interlocutrice”). Whether or not this furnishes a convincing motive for the poem's apparent discontinuities, Sakari's analysis does call our attention to the way Azalais establishes multiple links with fellow troubadours, Raimbaut as well as Guilhem de Saint-Leidier (see the discussion of the ric ome debate below), locating her poem within the places and society that enjoyed its pleasures.

In addition to the enumeration of specific places associated with Orange (“Aurenga”) in st. VI, this characteristic is most noteworthy in the tornada, the envoi where troubadours and trobairitz frequently address the beloved, their patrons, other poets, and even the performer (joglar) who will sing their song.

Ioglar que aves cor gai,
ves Narbona portas lai
ma chanson a la fenida
lei cui iois e iovenz guida.

(53-56)

Jongleur, whose heart is gay,
carry out toward Narbonne
my song with these final verses
to her whose guides are youth and joy.

Azalais asks Joglar to carry her song to Narbonne to the one guided by “iois e iovenz”—the popular binomial pair suggests again the essence of a society espousing the ethic of fin'amor. This allusion undoubtedly designates Ermengarde of Narbonne, given the time frame in which Azalais is placed by her vida and research on her literary references. Just as the lovers of troubadour lyric are frequently identified by their placement in space—the poet here (sai), the beloved there (lai)—the people in Azalais's canso are placed along two geographical axes that coincide with the polarization of emotions: the negative ones oriented toward Orange (and particularly valorized in the rhyme position: Belesgar, Aurenga, Proenza, ll. 41, 42, 44), the positive ones toward Velay and Narbonne. The wintry time of the “springtime opening” is thus articulated in space through the layering of stanzas that combine to form Azalais's canso.

Among the Comtessa de Dia's songs, she sends two to her beloved, “Ab ioi” (no. 1) and “Estat ai en greu cossirer” (no. 3). As is typical in woman's song, she addresses him as amics or bels amics (fair friend), although interestingly in some manuscripts of “Ab ioi” he appears in the tornada as Floris, the name of the hero from a well-known medieval romance, Floris and Blanchaflor. Castelloza's tornada in “Amics, s'ie.us trobes” (no. 6) expresses her desire not to send words, but to speak them herself: “E no.us man, q'ieu mezeussa.us o dic” (44). Here she echoes with variation Guilhem IX's fear to send a message to his lady through someone else (expressed in “Mout jauzens”). This motif not only expresses the desire for direct contact between lovers, but relates as well to the theme of secrecy, one of the key ideas of fin'amor as it operates in the public arena of the court. The use of a senhal (literally a sign, or in this context a secret code name) typically reflects this theme in troubadour lyric, as it preserves a mask of secrecy for the lover's open declarations of love and hides the name of the beloved from gossips and scandalmongers, the lauzengier.

In “A chantar,” the Comtessa addresses her song itself as messenger and in “Fin ioi” she teasingly flouts “vos, gelos mal parlan” (no. 4, 17), the figure of the evil-speaking jealous one also frequently evoked in woman's song. The two tornadas of “Ia de chantar” name Castelloza's beloved—again with a senhal, “Bels Noms” (no. 5, 59: “beautiful name”)—and another trobairitz, Almuc de Castelnou (55), recognizable in the variants of “Dompna n'Almurs (N), n'Almirs (IK), and n'Almir (d)” (Paden, ed. “Poems” 162). Both Rofin and Lady H. close their tornadas by calling upon Lady Agnesina to judge the opposing arguments of their partimen (no. 23, 65-66, 70-72), a typical gesture in the tensos that reminds us how real people and poetry interact in the context of Occitanic society.

To grasp further the mixture of images thus combined, we need to examine more specifically the dramatis personae placed on the stage of troubadour lyric and their incarnations in the songs of the trobairitz. In so doing, we can explore the nature of fin'amor as received and articulated by the women troubadours. A brief analysis of the major characters—the lyric voice of the self, its love object, and third parties—as they pass from troubadour lyric into the poems of the trobairitz, reveals an important series of shifts and reversals, even as the basic types are maintained. Marianne Shapiro has pointed out the asymmetrical polarity between courting men and courting ladies: in the troubadour's poem, the lady represents the apex of courtly values and the poet lover, though he may be a great lord, assumes the position of humble vassal. When a woman takes the position of the lover and begins to sing, the male beloved cannot simply move into her vacated position “without exciting a polemic that would attack the core of the humilis/sublimis paradox as it pertains to the hierarchy of courtly love” (“The Provençal Trobairitz” 562).

In corroboration of such a dissymmetry, Pierre Bec's analysis of the modes of address and reciprocal designations used by troubadours and trobairitz (“‘Trobairitz’” 243-44) points out that in the tensos, for example, the trobairitz designate their male partners by their full names (with or without a title) or by a first name, more rarely by amics or amics plus a first name, while the troubadour always uses the respectful title of domna. Bec sees this practice as maintaining the functional distance between high-born lady and lover of lower rank, indispensable to the ideal of fin'amor. The domna imitates the troubadour (without addressing him as such) and implies that she will never love anyone but a knight or lord. Always referring to herself as domna, she enters the system less as a woman than as a lady, “c'est-à-dire, encore et toujours, comme protectrice et dominatrice” (244). If this is generally valid in terms of the vocabulary Bec has analyzed, we also need to explore other aspects of the trobairitz' self-representation to nuance and modify his overview for particular women poets and poems (on Castelloza's double reversal of the troubadour's stance, for example, see Bruckner, “Na Castelloza”).

If the lady who begins to sing does not completely vacate her position in the asymmetrical balance of power between domna and lover, it should not surprise us that some of the trobairitz speak exactly as midons (the lady as lord) is pictured by the male troubadours in their complaints, dreams, hopes, and fears. In the tenso initiated by “Na donzela,” “Bona domna, tan vos ay fin coratge,” the lady who is asked to forgive “the one who loves you more than he's loved anyone” (no. 26, 4) corresponds exactly to the troubadours' domna. She knows how a lady should honorably behave when she sees her lover boasting about her and acting foolishly:

… be.m deu esser salvatge
can el gaba ni se vana de me; …
non m'en reptetz si la foldat l'en ve,
q'aysi o aug dir que dretz es onratge.

(9-10, 15-16)

… I am right to be harsh
when he mocks me and boasts about me; …
don't scold me if I recognize his folly,
for I hear that the right way brings honor.

Concerned that his failure or betrayal may lower her own worth, she withdraws her love: “car ia per el non vuelh mon pretz dissendre” (32). The donzela in the meantime paints a picture of the lover that likewise recalls the troubadours' self-presentation: he is dying for love of her, a single kiss could make his heart revive, no other woman has power over him (“poder ni senhoratge,” 8); his sighs should make her take pity on him. The feudal language retains the usual reversal of hierarchy: the domna is invested with power and a proud heart, the lover offers—through the donzela's intercession—his humble heart (“sos cors humil,” 36) to win her forgiveness. The advice for future behavior the lady gives her lover, if he wants her permission to continue loving her, recalls Guilhem IX's description of an obedient lover in “Pus vezem de novel florir”: he should be happy and worthy, humble and generous, courteous with all, neither evil nor too proud, but true and loving and discreet (41-48).

In general, the women poets do not respond directly to the male poets' request for love, initiating their own, parallel requests instead, as in the spirited exchange between Lombarda and Bernart Arnaut, no. 21 (see Sankovitch). If such a lady corresponds to the troubadours' expectations of difficulty, high standards, and increased worth, the idealized, but demanding domna who ennobles the man who rises in merit to deserve her love, other trobairitz recall the more obliging lady of the troubadours' hopes and dreams. Some trobairitz do answer their lovers' pleas with the kind of confirmation so long desired in the troubadours' cansos. Consider the tenso, “Si.m fos graziz” (no. 24). The first part, addressed to bella domna, contains the typical complaints of the poet lover, separated from joy and enjoyment, thrown into “not-caring” (non chaler, 3) by his lady. But when she speaks to him in the second part, we hear just the humble voice wished for (“degues humilitatz / venir en vos,” 18-19: “humility should find you”). She, too, is improved by love and, far from placing him in non chaler (29), she gives herself to him loyally, without deceit: “car gauz entier non puesc senz vos aver, / a cui m'autrei leialmen senz engan; / e.us lais mon cor en gauge on qu'eu m'an” (30-32: “for without you I can have no total joy. / I give myself to you with loyalty, without deception; / wherever I go, I leave you my heart as pledge”).

The language of political obligation, as used here by the lady, reverses the conventionally reversed hierarchy, places the lady at the mercy of her lover—who affirmed earlier his own loss of power over his eyes and himself (13-14) in the face of the lady's power over love (22). The echoes of metaphor and language thus affirm the mutuality of their love, the mutuality of their submission to the other's power, while the obstacles to such easy reciprocity are identified by the lady as a subterfuge, a deceitful appearance that masks the lovers' reality from those cruel, troublesome people who do not like the lovers' joy (33-35).

Clara d'Anduza blames such lauzengier for driving away her lover, and the Comtessa de Dia laughingly dismisses them in “Fin ioi” (cf. the domna of no. 25, “Amics, en gran cosirier,” who is less concerned than Raimbaut about the effect of lauzengier). They are the ubiquitous rivals and gossips in love, conventional characters among the third parties of troubadour lyric and part of its setting within the context of seigneurial courts. The husband only occasionally puts in an appearance, usually as the jealous figure represented in the popularizing lyric types, but he is evoked as well in Castelloza's “Mout avetz faich” in a less conventional role, when he is presented as grateful to her amic for creating his wife's suffering in love. The public of lovers is often called upon to verify or criticize a lover's conduct. Consider Azalais d'Altier's advice to a lady whose pardon she seeks for an offending lover. If she does not forgive him, she will be less esteemed (“meinz prezada,” no. 32, 53) by all courtly lovers (“totz los finz amanz,” 52). Castelloza fears to set a bad example for other women who love, “las autras amairitz” (no. 7, 21-22), but also maintains that her beloved is judged harshly by lovers: “qe l'amador / vos tenon per salvatge” (no. 5, 13-14). The trobairitz, like the troubadours, are aware that their songs exist in the paradox of private feelings publicly performed. Intimate emotions are directly tied to outer behavior, whether in love or in song, which inevitably connects the individual lovers to the courtly society in which they circulate.

Although we might expect the cultural model of the passive woman to make it difficult for the lady to speak out, in fact very few trobairitz mention such a constraint. Anticipating criticism from those who do not understand that courting in song does her good, Castelloza parries any possible attack in a defensively polemical way that affirms the personal benefit she feels from her singing (no. 6, st. III and IV), the same healing effect also claimed by troubadours for themselves. The Comtessa de Dia exuberantly defends a woman's right to speak openly of her love, once she has chosen an appropriately worthy lover, and expects right-thinking people (“li pro ni.ll'avinen,” no. 1, 23) to have only good things to say about such a lady. In analyzing the lady's decision to court openly in song, Lauire A. Finke proposes the model of patron and client to describe what is at stake for the lady who decides to offer her love (58-59). Consider in that light Garsenda de Forcalquier's initiative in the exchange of coblas with Gui de Cavaillon: although she herself has just declared her love (4) and encouraged Gui to be less timid, she attributes a lady's hesitation to disclose all her desires to fear of failure (no. 16, 8-9). Hesitation to speak of their love appears elsewhere as a common motif for troubadour lovers (and is particularly developed by the trouvères of Northern France in the image of the cowardly lover). Other trobairitz remain silent on the issue of a woman speaking out, which may not in fact be perceived as a problem by ladies so closely integrated into the world of troubadour song (cf. the historical arguments offered below for the relatively favorable position of aristocratic women in Occitanian society, especially during the period when the trobairitz were singing). On the other hand, the relatively limited participation of women poets in a poetic system clearly designed from the male lover's point of view remains an important factor to consider when approaching the trobairitz corpus (cf. Gravdal's analysis of the way trobairitz grapple with the difficulty of occupying the place of the subject in troubadour lyric by changing the metaphorical stance typical of the troubadour—“I sing like a woman”—to a metonymic one—“I sing as a woman”; see also Kay, Subjectivity Ch. 3).

To continue the analysis of how lovers are represented by the trobairitz, we may fruitfully compare how the male and female troubadours' complaints and accusations line up against each other. F. R. P. Akehurst has summarized the male poets' list of grievances: ladies show orgolh (pride); they neither believe nor trust nor remember the lover, and even love other, worthless men; ladies are capricious and irrational, fail to reward proper service and cannot distinguish false lovers from true ones, who thus suffer and die. The trobairitz, too, accuse their lovers of pride and unfaithfulness. They often complain further of trust betrayed. As William Paden points out in his comments on gender difference in lyric, given a cultural context that generally calls for men to be active and women passive, trobairitz tend to speak of a love already initiated, while troubadours still hope to get theirs accepted (“Utrum” 79-80; cf. the narrative structure based on the model of the abandoned woman that Merritt Blakeslee [71-73] finds common to all the trobairitz' cansos, except for “Ab ioi” and “Fin ioi”). Accordingly, the trobairitz complain that their lovers are indiscreet and hurt their ladies' reputations, desert them and claim to be their equals, act cowardly and unpleasantly. The complaints of troubadours and trobairitz occasionally correspond, but they just as frequently open a gap: the trobairitz do not really respond directly to the troubadours' accusations; they insist rather on their own fidelity in love, their readiness to forgive, and the force of their desire, which makes them regret or reject any show of pride.

Both Akehurst and Kittye Delle Robbins have pointed out how important a role the theme of trust plays in the trobairitz corpus, as indicated by the vocabulary used most frequently. With a computer concordance, Akehurst has compared the twenty most frequently used nouns in the twenty-three poems of Meg Bogin's edition with the top twenty nouns of twenty troubadours (558 poems). Of the ten nouns that appear only in the women poets' list, three in particular suggest the trobairitz' concern with fidelity and infidelity between lovers: falhimen (offense), drut (lover), and fe (faithfulness) (see Bruckner, “Na Castelloza” 251-52 n20). The semantic field of fidelity/infidelity is richly represented among the nouns of the trobairitz corpus, including in addition to the three on the “top twenty list”: faillensa, faillida, faillir, traïr, traitor, plevir, fiansa, acordamen, acord, jurar, covinen, recrezens, recrezamen, camjar, camjairitz (Robbins also adds fegnedor and trichador). While Akehurst relates this vocabulary group to the major complaints directed by the trobairitz against their lovers, Robbins suggests that it leads, on the one hand, to the women's desire to prove themselves worthy (while at the same time deploring the lover's unworthy betrayal) and, on the other, to the concern for reputation and the woman's particular vulnerability to the gelos and the lauzengier (“Love's Martyrdoms”; see also Kay, Subjectivity 107-08). These thematic avenues suggest further useful work to be done based on vocabulary studies, especially if they are expanded to include trobairitz poems left out of Bogin's edition, as well as comparisons with similar analyses of the troubadour corpus (cf. Ferrante on the use of negative constructions in the trobairitz corpus, “Notes”).

The theme of trust between lovers inevitably raises the issue of sexuality. Scholars have often remarked that one of the major differences between the lady of troubadour lyric and the women troubadours is the latter's sensuous expression of desire. As the Comtessa de Dia sings:

Estat ai en gran cossirier
per un cavallier q'ai agut,
e vuoil sia totz temps saubut
cum eu l'ai amat a sobrier,
ara vei q'ieu sui trahida
car eu non li donei m'amor
don ai estat en gran error
en lieig e quand sui vestida.

(no. 3: 1-8)

I have been sorely troubled
about a knight I had;
I want it known for all time
how exceedingly I loved him.
Now I see myself betrayed
because I didn't grant my love
to him; I've suffered much distress
from it, in bed and fully clothed.

In the closing stanza of her song, the Comtessa follows up on her opening remarks, suggestively situated in the context of a bed, by telling her amic that she would like to have him in the place of her husband (“en luoc del marit” 22), an expression whose ambiguities have been richly fueled by her previous question:

Bels amics avinens e bos,
cora.us tenrai en mon poder,
e que iagues ab vos un ser,
e qe.us des un bais amoros?

(17-20)

Fair, agreeable, good friend,
when will I have you in my power,
lie beside you for an evening,
and kiss you amorously?

How does this compare to the lady envisaged by the troubadours? E. Jane Burns describes the troubadour's domna as a combination of “two unequal fictions: 1) an ideal desexualized lady, embodying virtues her admirer would like to attain, finds her opposite in 2) the erotic yet aloof woman who remains unattainable” (268). Many a troubadour would like to penetrate her chamber, watch her undress or place his hands under her robe, but the lady herself—as she is typically (but not universally) represented by the troubadours—does not share the lover's dream or desire. By contrast, the trobairitz' frank expression of desire has led many critics to admire or chastise their spontaneity and authenticity, while comparing them to the legendary Sappho.

Shapiro suggests that the Comtessa de Dia's persona of the passionate lady relates the trobairitz to the lady of romance (“The Provençal Trobairitz” 563). Of course, troubadours and trobairitz do refer to romance examples of great lovers. The Comtessa de Dia twice compares herself and her lover to such a pair, but in the crisscross pattern of the comparisons she likens herself to the male, not the female, lover. More importantly for the trobairitz, the desiring woman is abundantly available from the popularizing woman's song as well. The female speaker of the chansons de femme typically sings of her longings, her physical charms and desires, falls into despair without her lover to whom she offers total submission. In the face of his absence, she affirms her loyalty and pain, felt in the intensity of her desire (Bec, “‘Trobairitz’” 252; Davidson 456; Earnshaw Ch. 3). The incantatory quality of Tibors' negations and repeated phrases, accumulated to suggest the power of her desire, recall with particular insistence the kind of effects achieved in the cantigas de amigo:

Bels dous amics, ben vos puosc en ver dir
qe anc non fo q'eu estes ses desir
pos vos conuc ni.us pris per fin aman;
ni anc no fo q'eu non agues talan,
bels dous amics, q'eu soven no.us vezes

(no. 36, 1-5)

Fair, sweet friend, I can truly tell you
I have never been without desire
since I met you and took you as true lover;
nor has it happened that I lacked the wish,
my fair, sweet friend, to see you often.

Despite their apparent forthrightness, the trobairitz' expressions of desire remain couched in what Robbins has called “self-protective ambiguity even more multifaceted than the men's—it is always impossible to tell whether ‘she does or doesn't’ from their hypothetical situations, their daydreams and invitations, even their vows of (always future) surrender” (“Love's Martyrdoms”; cf. Paden, “Utrum” 81). The Comtessa de Dia would like to have her lover in (the) place of her husband, but the conditional verb suggests he hasn't been there yet. Clara d'Anduza refuses to give up her desire that only increases before others' reproaches (9-12), but the absence of her lover keeps her desire in the same state of unsatisfied longing that we associate with the typical troubadour lover himself. Indeed the expression of desire is as conventional for the male speaker of troubadour lyric, as it is for the female voice of the women's songs and offers another model the trobairitz use to their own ends. The feat of the women troubadours is to conflate two identities, male and female, in their own singing voice. As Robbins points out, the trobairitz thus reclaim and reconvert the role of love's martyr, which male troubadours first adapted from “the archetypal female figure of the virgin-martyr, the suffering saint whose death is an affirmation of love” (“Love's Martyrdoms”).

This conversion and reconversion of male and female roles returns us to the issue of power, however “passively” that power may be expressed in the troubadours' “feminized” role. In troubadour lyric in general, the indissoluble link between power and love may strike us as one of the major themes of their poetry, and this is nowhere more compelling than in the tensos and cansos of the trobairitz, where the sexual balance of power often appears as the main issue debated, analyzed, and experienced. Issues of hierarchy and power are directly confronted when the trobairitz participate in the debate about the ric ome, the rich man (Sakari, “Thème”): should a lady love a man only if his social position is inferior to hers? Both Azalais de Porcairagues and Maria de Ventadorn take up polemical positions within that controversy and both use the language of fidelity oaths between lord and vassal to describe the relationship between lovers. In her partimen with Gui d'Ussel, Maria de Ventadorn herself chooses the subject for debate and places it squarely on the question of equality or hierarchy between lovers:

vuoill qe.m digatz si deu far egalmen
dompna per drut, qan lo qier francamen,
cum el per lieis, tot cant taing ad amor,
segon los dreitz que tenon l'amador.

(no. 12, 5-8)

e
I want you to tell me if a lady should do equally
for her lover all that pertains to love,
when he asks honestly, as he does for her,
according to the laws that lovers hold.

The syntax of her question already demonstrates in its interlaced clauses how inextricably the lady and her lover are linked through the issues of desire and equality. Once Gui makes his choice for equality, Maria argues for maintaining the conventional, reversed hierarchy between domna and drut, with the lady in the position of power. She bases her argument on the troubadours' own words, their use of feudal language (which she quotes), when they offer themselves according to the ceremony of homage to the lord: on their knees, hands joined, they declare themselves the lady's vassal and offer their service freely.

anz ditz chascus, qan vol preiar,
mans iointas e de genolos:
“Dompna, voillatz qe.us serva franchamen
cum lo vostr'om,” et ella enaissi.l pren.

(35-40)

e
instead each (lover), when he wants to court,
says, with hands joined and on his knees;
“Lady, permit me to serve you honestly
as your liege man” and that's the way she takes him.

Franchamen (37), the same adverb that plays a key role in Maria's opening question—along with egalmen (5, 27, 28)—connotes not only the rank of a free man who participates in the reciprocal bond of fidelity and service, but also the conduct and manners appropriate to that social level. If the lady accepts that offer of service, then the servant/lover, vassal of his lady, must accept the consequences of his act: a declaration of equality in the face of such a hierarchical relationship constitutes treason: “Eu vo.l iutge per dreich a trahitor, si.s rend pariers e.is det per servidor” (39-40: “I rightly consider him a traitor if, having given himself as a servant, he makes himself an equal”), declares Maria in conclusion. Like the troubadours themselves, Maria extrapolates from the language of power relations a series of rights and obligations that limit or control the actions of the participants. Usually the lady is the target of the troubadours' complaints that she is not fulfilling her part of the feudal contract by rewarding loyal service; here the complaint falls on the man's head. He should obey her as “per amiga e per dompna eissamen” (22)—both lady and beloved—but she should honor her lover “cum ad amic, mas non cum a seignor” (24: “as a friend, but not as overlord”) (N.B. the lord returns onor, a fief, in exchange for the vassal's service). She alone may occupy the position of authority. Appropriately, as initiator of this tenso, Maria has herself taken the lead, metrically and ideologically.

It is perhaps one of the great paradoxes of fin'amor, as elaborated by troubadours and trobairitz, to have focused on the powerful and disordering force of love, operating independently of social constraints, though not necessarily adulterous by definition, and to have elaborated that notion of love not as a malady (as in the classical conception), but as an emotion that can be channeled into a whole set of socially useful actions (courtliness in the largest sense), an emotion to be analyzed and explored with reference to principles of right and wrong. As Maria says, “segon los dreitz que tenon l'amador” (8). The parallel established between the feudal relationship of lord and vassal and the love relationship of lady and lover serves as one of the key tools for finding order within the basically disordering power of love (see Bruckner, “Fictions” 882-83; cf. Cheyette's analysis of the linguistic continuum connecting poetic and legal discourse of the period: both registers mix the languages of love and power relations).

Equally important for establishing order in disorder is the form of the tenso itself, the debate in which lovers argue and disagree, according to principles differently understood perhaps, but still applicable by general agreement. Hence the importance of the verb dever (should, ought to), invoked over and over again by both Maria (5, 19, 20, 21, 23) and Gui (14, 16, 27, 30, 32, 46, 48). The notion of a standard, rather than any particular standard, allows both for agreement and disagreement, as expressed within troubadour lyric. This agreement in disagreement is perhaps as fundamental to the canso as to the tenso, but the latter makes it more explicit, foregrounds the contest of rival views and poetic craft. If the system itself did not admit of differing points of view then there could be no tenso.

In order to argue for equality of the lovers, Gui d'Ussel shifts the principle by which to make such a judgment from the issue of rank to that of the quality or quantity of love shared by the lovers. If they are equally amorous, the lady should honor her lover equally (27-28). Gui repeats and elaborates the key adverb egalmen (cf. earlier comunalmen 14: in kind; ses garda de ricor 15: “without regard to rank”), by twice relating it to another important adverb that reflects one of the basic virtues of fin'amor: finamen (29; 46: “perfectly”). Just as Maria ignores in her replies Gui's attempt to redefine the nature of the argument in terms of the quality of shared love, his last stanza likewise constitutes a refusal to close the debate on her terms. Rephrasing the issue of equality in terms of the love itself, rather than the respective ranks of the lovers, Gui dictates Maria's future words as a choice ad absurdum: “Either you'll say (and not to your honor) / that the lover must love her more perfectly, / or you'll say that they are equals, / for he owes her nothing but what he gives for love” (45-48). A standoff in which the lady controls the opening statement, the man—inevitably by the formal principles of the tenso itself—the closing words, which he cleverly attributes to the lady herself.

Azalais de Porcairagues takes up her stance in this debate in stanza three of her canso, “Ar em al freg temps vengut”:

Dompna met mout mal s'amor
que ab ric ome plaideia,
ab plus aut de vavasor;
e s'ill o fai il folleia,
car so diz om en Veillai
que ges per ricor non vai,
e dompna que n'es chauzida
en tenc per envilanida.

(no. 11, 17-24)

A lady places her love poorly
when she seeks out a man of wealth
higher than a vavassor.
If she does, she's acting foolish,
for people in Velay say this:
love does not go with riches.
If a lady's known for that
I consider her dishonored.

Her position in the debate requires the social rank of the lovers to correspond to a hierarchy in which the lady occupies the superior position, to avoid the possible dishonor of attaching the lady's love to the coercions of money and power. It may then surprise us to hear Azalais later in the same song reverse her theoretical position by placing herself in the role of vassal, her lover in that of lord. She praises him, as the troubadour does his lady: “Amic ai de gran valor / que sobre toz seignoreia” (25-26: “I have a friend of utmost worth, / higher than all the others”). He has granted her his heart and she is engaged forever in his service; to the lord's action of granting (autreia 28) corresponds the vassal's promise of service (en guatge 34). The general issue of power phrased in terms of society's ranks for the ric ome debate now transforms itself into a more personal mode through the metaphorical relationship binding lover and beloved, with the twist that in this canso the male and female roles are reversed, the female poet conceding to her male beloved the power the troubadour invests in his lady.

Sarah Kay (Subjectivity 104-05) points out a number of similarities that suggest Azalais's canso plays off against two poems by Raimbaut d'Aurenga (probably designated in vv. 14 and 42), himself a champion of the ric ome. In “Entre gel e vent e fanc” (no. XV in Pattison, ed.), sent to Azalais under the senhal Joglar, we find a springtime opening also turned upside down by winter's onslaught, as well as the unusual word esglais in the rhyme position (Azalais 14; Raimbaut 34 and no. XXII 36, also sent to Joglar). Equally striking is Raimbaut's invitation to the lady to put him to a test: “Mas mandatz mi per plans essais, / Per tal cobrir sol sapcha.l cais!” (47-48: “But command me to a clear trial [of my love], with such secretness that only the mouth will know it!”).

In a variation produced by reversing the male/female roles, Azalais announces to her amic that she will soon place herself at his mercy:

tost en veirem a l'assai,
qu'en vostra merce.m metrai;
vos m'aves la fe plevida,
que no.m demandes faillida.

(37-40)

Soon we'll come to the test:
I'll put myself at your mercy.
You have given your word
to ask nothing wrong of me.

These verses have kept scholars busy ever since René Nelli's theory about the assag as a ritual of courtly love. Whether or not they reflect such a custom (which may be too literal a reading of the game of poetry), these verses do offer a wonderful example of the concatenated, intertwined balance of power between man and woman as expressed in the political language of oaths and bonds. She will place herself in his power, yes, but according to his previous promise to ask her nothing that would constitute a failure. This is a perfect illustration of how power is conceded to the other, apparently superior, only to be ultimately controlled by the humble vassal. Azalais plays this game of disguised power as craftily as any troubadour lover, while also retaining for herself the position of open power declared in the ric ome stanza.

In fact, the trobairitz' way of appropriating and manipulating a linguistic and literary system created by male troubadours suggests that whoever assumes the position of speaker within that lyric system, whether male or female, will appear to attribute the power of lordship or control to the beloved other. As in Lacan's analysis of intersubjective relationships in Poe's Purloined Letter, what a character sees, says, or does depends more on the position occupied at a given moment than on any inherent feature that defines the character in the slot. The use of feudal language by troubadours and trobairitz may thus be keyed more to position than to gender per se, although gender shifts in the roles of subject and object may add new and changing resonances to the public's perception.

The test envisaged by Azalais recalls the Comtessa de Dia's great desire to hold her lover in the husband's place, on condition, she adds, that he promise to do all that she desires: “ab so que m'aguessetz plevit / de far tot so qu'eu volria” (no. 3, 23-24). We may wonder—and the Comtessa's expressions throughout the song encourage us to do so—if “all she would desire” calls for much or little from the lover. Among the trobairitz, the Comtessa's four cansos show her the most willing to try on a wide variety of self-images, as she sings (often simultaneously) from positions projected by the troubadour for himself or the domna or in a voice we associate more readily with the female singer in chansons de femme. Does she experiment here with the burlesque voice we can trace back to Guilhem IX's songs for his companions? Without going beyond the ambiguities of innuendo, she certainly enriches her verse with all the resources of suggestion.

Both Azalais's and the Comtessa's formulation of a test appears as part of a larger pattern that recurs in the trobairitz corpus: the interplay between desire and control, or rather, the desire for control over the beloved expressed in a variety of ways by women troubadours. As Maria de Ventadorn claimed in her tenso with Gui d'Ussel, the lover should obey his lady's commands, while she may grant his requests as coming from a friend, never obey them as commanded by a lord (no. 12, 23-24). Alamanda goes so far as to insist that a lover should believe all that his lady says—even if she declares a high mountain to be a plain (no. 13, 13-14)—and be pleased with all that she gives him, whether good or bad (15). Indeed it is precisely this kind of desire for control over all the lover's actions that Lanfranc Cigala laments in his partimen with Guilielma de Rosers: “qu'oimais vei zo qe de donas crezia: / qe no vos platz q'autre pelegrinatge / fassan li drut, mas ves vos tota via” (no. 22, 34-36: “now I see confirmed my belief about ladies: / for you, there's no other pilgrimage / lovers should make except, by all roads, to you”). Lovers, like horses, should be trained with good sense and measure, “car lo drutz cochatz tan malamen / lur faill poders” (39-40: “but you spur your lovers so harshly / that their powers fail”). Lanfranc's comparison introduces all sorts of innuendoes that Guilielma is quick to pick up and play with in her response (47-48).

Their witty repartee is typical of the kind of humorous attacks that characterize many of the debate poems and recalls another partimen in the trobairitz repertoire, that between Rofin and Domna H., which is based on a question whose form echoes Azalais's test: a lady invites her two lovers to swear an oath, before entering her bed, that they will do no more than hug and kiss her. The one who cares little about oaths swears immediately, the other does not. Rofin chooses the side of strict obedience and argues according to the conventional image of the humble lover who obeys his lady and wants only to please her. Since the lady has given Rofin the choice of which side to defend, she is obliged to argue on behalf of the lover who would break his oath under the effect of his passion for the lady, and she does so with great gusto, insisting that the lover's lack of restraint is an appropriate indication of his love. As in Lanfranc and Guilielma's partimen, the debate itself shifts from general question to personal confrontation, as the notion of the test reverberates between sexual and verbal contest. When Aimeric de Peguilhan and Elias d'Ussel debate a variation of the same question (“N'Elias, conselh vos deman”)—phrased by Elias as a test offered to him by his lady—the public which recognizes the recurrent motif will be able to savor the ingenuities of each poet who reinvents situations and arguments within a common scenario (whose misogynistic overtones have been signalled by Kay, Subjectivity 99).

In each of these examples we see trobairitz and their male counterparts interacting not only within the poetic system as a whole, but more specifically listening and singing to each other, responding to and reinventing each other's songs, as they refashion the common materials of troubadour lyric. The trobairitz explore that system from a woman's point of view, without reducing women's points of view to unanimity. For readers who are attentive to their play, these female voices, whether invented by women poets or male troubadours, enrich and enlarge the scope of troubadour tradition.

FINDING THE TROBAIRITZ

The twenty names of women troubadours supplied by manuscripts often pose as many questions as they seem to resolve. Can we attach a specific identity to an unqualified first name or a simple initial, as in the case of “Lombarda” or “Domna H.”? Can we be confident that a real woman poet is designated by the name or is she a fiction invented by a male troubadour, as scholars have frequently speculated regarding not only the anonymous domnas but also named poets like Alamanda and Ysabella?

Margaret Switten's research suggests that trobairitz are identified by manuscript attributions about as reliably as troubadours (which is to say sometimes we can believe the manuscripts and sometimes not). Their distribution across chansonniers from different regions demonstrates a certain scarcity in the north (they appear in only one trouvère collection, W) and not much better representation in their home territory (C, E, and R, the important Provençal or Occitan collections have few of their songs). Their more hospitable reception in the Italian chansonniers (where the troubadours in general are better represented than anywhere else, but usually with no transmission of their melodies) may account for the fact that only one trobairitz song comes to us accompanied by its music (“A chantar” in W). While most manuscripts mix together songs of male and female poets, Pierre Bec and others have noted that some Catalan and Italian chansonniers of the 13th and 14th c. group them all together, as if recognizing at that point the anomaly of their appearance as female poets singing in a male-dominated tradition (“‘Trobairitz’” 262; Paden, ed. “Poems” 163; Rieger, “‘Ins e.l cor’” 389-91). These tend to be the same manuscripts whose authors, editors, or scribes feel the need to write biographies and commentaries that introduce the songs to an audience separated by time and geography from the Occitanian society in which they were originally composed and performed.

What do the vidas and razos, our first examples of vernacular literary history and interpretation, teach us about the trobairitz? Only five have vidas, all of them quite short: Tibors, Comtessa de Dia, Azalais de Porcairagues, Castelloza, and Lombarda. Lombarda's vida quickly becomes a more elaborate razo that sets into a narrative explanation the coblas she exchanges with Bernart Arnaut. In similar fashion, razos allegedly explain the tensos between Almuc de Castelnau and Iseut de Capio, Maria de Ventadorn and Gui d'Ussel, Guillelma de Rosers and Lanfranc Cigala, Alamanda and Giraut de Bornelh. Garsenda, the Countess of Provence, is mentioned as the object of love and song in the vidas of Elias de Barjols and Gui de Cavaillon. Clara d'Anduza appears in a razo to one of Uc de Saint Circ's songs. If we include Gaudairenca from Raimon de Miraval's razo, this brings to thirteen the total number of trobairitz named in vidas and razos (one hundred and one names are listed in the Table of Contents of the Biographies des troubadours).

More importantly, Bec's brief analysis of the length and contents of these vidas and razos points out that biographers seem to have made no fundamental distinction between male and female poets in their use of commonplaces or style in general (“‘Trobairitz’” 238-39). Ladies—and they are all domnas—whether loved by troubadours, loving in turn, or only protecting the poets who sing their praises (multiple roles frequently combined), are described with the same adjectives, the same set of qualities, taken for the most part from the lyrics themselves. The trobairitz are gentil, bella, avinens, enseignada (noble, beautiful, charming, educated). Maria de Ventadorn is “la plus preziada dompna qe anc fos en Lemozin” (Boutière-Schutz 213: “the most prized lady ever found in Limousin”). The women are frequently described as having composed or knowing how to compose songs (trobar). As Tibors' biographer says: “cortesa fo et enseignada, avinens e fort maïstra; e saup trobar” (Boutière-Schutz 498: “she was courteous/courtly and educated, charming and very learned, and she knew how to compose songs”).

Each biography locates the lady in a place, gives her a lover (often named) and sometimes a husband. The Comtessa de Dia, for example, is described as the wife of “En Guillem de Peitius,” but she loves and sings about Raimbaut d'Aurenga (Boutière-Schutz 445). Despite her highly unusual name (Paden, ed. “Poems” 158-59), Castelloza is firmly situated in Auvergne as the wife of Turc de Mairona; her beloved and the subject of her songs is identified as Arman de Breon (Boutière-Schutz 333). Love and desire for fame frequently go hand in hand in this world, as we see in the rest of Tibors' vida where she is described as both loving and loved (“enamorada” and “fort amada per amor”), honored by all the good men, feared and obeyed by all the worthy ladies of the region (Boutière-Schutz 498). Clara d'Anduza's desire for worth and praise inspires first Uc de St. Circ's songs and then their mutual love, according to the razo (Boutière-Schutz 244), and in similar fashion we are told how Azalais loved Gui Guerrejat and “fez de lui maintas bonas cansos” (Boutière-Schutz 342: “she made many good songs about him”). The gender of the pronouns may change, but the kinds of relationships illustrated remain the same. What we see represented in the vidas and razos, as well as in the songs, is a network of crisscrossed ties linking men and women, loved and loving, troubadours and trobairitz, patrons and patronesses, husbands and wives, rivals, friends, and relatives. The legendary level—the stories invented around the poems—parallels and elaborates the intertextual allusions of the songs themselves, in which trobairitz poems respond to those of the troubadours (Robbins, “Love's Martyrdoms”).

To what extent can we believe the information so gleaned? Scholarly research suggests that a good deal of historical information lies buried in these vidas, but sometimes it eludes our grasp or seems to be garbled with an overlay of romance generated by the situations implied in the lyrics (and therefore repeated from one vida or razo to another). Turc de Mairona, for example, is named independently of Castelloza in a sirventes by Dalfin d'Alvernha, but no other historical documentation can verify the three figures mentioned in her vida or their relationships (Paden, ed. “Poems” 159-62). Tibors, located by her vida in Provence at the castle of Lord Blacatz (Boutière-Schutz 498) is also named as the judge in a tenso between Bertran de Saint-Felix and Uc de la Bacalaria and may appear as “Na Tibortz de Proensa” in a dansa by Guiraut d'Espanha (Boutière-Schutz 499 n2; Bec, ed. 66-67). With these clues, research on Raimbaut d'Aurenga has yielded enough to suggest that Tibors (a common name at that time) was either Raimbaut's mother or, more likely, his sister, the wife of Bertrand des Baux, a major patron of the troubadours (Pattison 10-27; Bogin 162-63). The Comtessa de Dia might be Beatrice, wife of William II of Poitiers, count of Valentinois, a contemporary of Raimbaut d'Aurenga (her name is often given to the Comtessa de Dia in anthologies), or Isoarde, the daughter of the Count of Die and wife of Raimon d'Agout who lived at the time of Raimbaut IV, a generation later (Pattison 27-30). Jean-Charles Huchet suggests the vida simply invents a literary fiction that brings the Comtessa into the presence of two great troubadours, the founder Guilhem IX and Raimbaut d'Aurenga, one of the masters of twelfth-century trobar (62-63). Based on the extant documents, no definitive identification seems possible, although Rieger's formal analysis of the Comtessa de Dia's songs locates them in the second half of the twelfth century and associates her through intertextual evidence with the circle of poets that includes Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Azalais de Porcairagues (614, 621).

With other trobairitz archival research yields more positive identification and information. Take the example of “la contesa de Proensa,” as she is named in Ms. F, or Garsenda, as she appears in two troubadour vidas. Stanislaw Stronski identifies her as the daughter of Raines de Claustral de Forcalquier, Garsenda, granddaughter of Guilhem IV, last particular count of Forcalquier (“Notes” 22-23). She brought Forcalquier as a dowry upon her marriage in 1193 to Alphonse II, count of Provence, brother of Pedro II of Aragon. According to Elias de Barjol's vida, she served as his literary patron after her husband's death. This occurred in 1209, after which her role at the court in Aix can be divided into two periods. Between 1209 and 1216, while her son Raimon-Berangar lived with the father's family in Aragon, she had neither title nor official authority at Aix, since these were usurped by her brother-in-law, Pedro II. In 1216 when her son returned, Garsenda successfully reclaimed her guardianship and exercised full authority in Aix until her son's majority and marriage to Beatrice of Savoy in 1219/20. As this new Countess of Provence claimed all the troubadours' attention, Garsenda retired to a nearby monastery, the abbey of La Celle, where she took her vows in 1225, with the proviso that she would retire completely only after she settled some outstanding affairs (Stronski 23-26). During her life, Garsenda thus played a key role in the power struggle between the Forcalquier family and the Counts of Provence, two of the most powerful and important noble families of southern France (Bogin 172), not only through her marriage but also through the guardianship she exercised during her son's minority, when she acted directly in the games of feudal power politics.

Maria de Ventadorn, daughter of Helis de Castelnau and Raimon II, Viscount of Turenne (1143-1191) in the Limousin, became the second wife (ca. 1190?) of Eble V, the great-grandson of one of the founding troubadours, Eble II (ca. 1106-47), and the grandson of Eble III, patron and rival of Bernart de Ventadorn (Rieger, “La mala canso” 1072-73). Bertran de Born praised the beauty of Maria and her two sisters (“las tres de Torena,” Rieger 1072), and Maria herself became an important patron of troubadours. She frequently appears in that role in dedicatory closing stanzas (tornadas), as well as in a number of razos, where she may be evoked as beloved, intercessor (e.g. in a razo for Pons de Capdoill, Boutière-Schutz 314-15), or inspiration to song. In a long razo linking several of Gaucelm Faidit's songs, for example, Maria is presented as the object of his love and songs, whose praise she enjoys without returning his love (Boutière-Schutz 170-76). Maria served as patroness for an impressive list of troubadours—who dedicate their songs to her or ask her to adjudicate their poetic debates—including Gaucelm, Gui de Puycibot, Giraut Rostanh de Merguas, the four Ussel poets, the Monk of Montaudon, Pons de Capdoill, Uc de Saint-Circ, Savaric de Mauleon, and Guiraut de Calanson (Bogin 169; Rieger, “La mala canso” 1073).

While none of these facts can tell us exactly why Maria or Garsenda themselves became trobairitz, they do reveal something about the kind of society in which troubadour lyric flourished and about the roles women could play in it. It is a commonplace of troubadour scholarship to explore the mysterious origins of courtly love in an effort to explain a poetic world that turns upside down our notions of patriarchal medieval society, in which women are necessarily and clearly subordinated to men, according to the combined ideologies of Christianity and feudalism. Sociological and historical approaches like Erich Köhler's and Georges Duby's seek, in some sense, to rectify the scandal of making a domna the ruling party in a feudal relationship and having her served by the humble poet vassal. If we understand, according to these theories, that the lady is really a stand-in for her husband (the dominus) in the struggle of landless knights or young bachelors to gain fiefs, then the lady is cleverly removed once again from a position of real power and restored to the subordinate status that befits her. Although it would be foolhardy to argue for matriarchy in Southern France or to read troubadour poetry as a direct mirror of society, historical research suggests that Occitanic society, in comparison with Northern France, did offer women wider scope for exercising power and participating in economic and political life. Codes of law persisted there allowing women a more privileged status, especially in relation to inheriting property, and the crusades left noble women at home with great administrative responsibilities (Bogin 20-36; Herlihy “Land” 89-120). Southern France was remarkable both for the extent of women's lands and the use of matronymics, despite feudalism's theoretical exclusion of women from seigniory (Herlihy “Land” 108).

By analyzing the language of legal charters, lists of witnesses, and the men and women designated as taking and receiving oaths, social historian Fredric Cheyette suggests that a disjuncture between powerful women in lyric and powerless women in patriarchal society simply does not apply to the Occitan society of this period. The rich, urbanized Occitania of the twelfth century did not make it difficult for the petty nobility or younger brothers to establish themselves economically, nor did it exclude women from all power relations. Ermengarde of Narbonne, for example, exercised military and political power in her own name, regardless of her marital status. As well documented as any lay lord of her time and place, the childless Ermengarde acted in relation to her sister's sons, their property rights and rights of succession, with what Cheyette calls “a powerful sense of dynasty, patrilineal, to be sure, yet not transportable by marriage into another patriline. In the absence of a male heir, it was women who were expected to maintain dynastic continuity, to train their sons or nephews or daughters in the traditions and rights of their maternal line” (11; italics in original).

Ermengarde has usually been viewed as exceptional, yet Cheyette describes her as typical within the larger pattern of relationships in Occitania, which were based primarily on covinens, personal ties and pledges of faithfulness. The language of oaths, as well as that of contracts of sale and gift, indicate that women and men were frequently in relations of power, fidelity, and service: at certain places and times men swore oaths of fidelity to women, to whom they were expected to give the same loyalty and service as to male lords; some charters show women giving such oaths to men as well. Legal documents of the period do not simply generalize in the masculine form, but specify the possible actions of men or women (“si homo aut femina”), either of whom might break their contracts and agreements (Cheyette 13).

As frequently happens, our preconceptions about the Middle Ages need to be modified, or at the very least nuanced by more detailed knowledge of specific times and places. What Duby finds to be true for the “juvenes” in Northwestern France does not necessarily apply to the South. Women's choices may be severely restricted in medieval society, as we are reminded by alternatives set up in Alaisina's tenso with Carenza (no. 27) or in “Coindeta sui” (no. 33), where the female speaker has no desire for her husband and would like him to be as young and gay as her lover. But we can also glimpse how troubadour songs may allude (however indirectly) to moments and places where women do exercise some power. Consider in this light the study of Martí Aurell i Cardona which begins by describing through a number of specific examples the privileged status of women in tenth-century Provence. From this highpoint, he then demonstrates an overall deterioration in the position of aristocratic women in Southern France from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, linked to a shift from “hypergamy” (men marrying women above them in the social scale) to “hypogamy” (men marrying their social inferiors). Despite this general trend, however, the Catalan historian identifies a kind of renaissance in women's status in the period between 1180 and 1230, which corresponds approximately to the period when the trobairitz were singing (see also Paden, Voice 1-19; cf. Courtemanche, who analyzes the position of women in fourteenth-century Provence).

Both literary and historical analysis lead us to understand troubadour lyric and the fin'amor it proclaims as manifestations of an elaborate social game, enjoyed, practiced, and performed in song by both men and women of the Occitanic courts. While the poetic system of the troubadours spread widely across the European continent and enjoyed tremendous success for hundreds of years, only in Southern France did it produce a substantial number of women poets. As far as we can determine, they were active from around 1170 until about 1260: they began singing after the first two generations of troubadours brought their poetic system to its classical stage and ceased before the last generation of the troubadours themselves fell silent (Paden, Voice 14). Although we may never be able to explain just why they existed, clues lie in the characteristics of the society in which troubadour lyric originated and in the roles associated with singing, composing, and patronizing troubadour song in the life of the Occitan courts.

THE TROBAIRITZ CORPUS

Measured against the approximately 2500 troubadour songs in manuscript, the corpus of the trobairitz presents a sample in miniature of the major and some of the minor lyric genres cultivated by the troubadours: cansos (love songs, the most prestigious and cultivated form among the troubadours), tensos (debate poems), sirventes (political poems), planh (lament), salut d'amor (a love letter not in strophic form), and several of the popularizing genres with refrains, alba (dawn song) and balada (dance song). Only part of one stanza from Tibors's canso reaches us; “Dieus sal” also appears in manuscript as a fragment (from a canso or a chanson d'ami). All the other trobairitz are represented by a single poem, except the Comtessa de Dia (four cansos) and Castelloza (three cansos or four, if one accepts Paden's and Rieger's arguments for assigning to her the anonymous canso, “Per ioi”). We might compare this with the typical extant output of the troubadours in general, which is calculated at about three or four poems apiece (Tavera 146).

The smallness of the corpus is, however, no great advantage for overcoming a number of uncertainties that make its delineation as problematic as counting the number of identifiable trobairitz. Recent editions have varied from twenty-three poems (Bogin) to forty-six (Rieger). Paden's checklist of poems by named and anonymous trobairitz, whether believed to be historical or fictional women, tallies forty-nine poems (Voice 227-37). The thirty-six selected for this edition include two (no. 33 and no. 34) of the three listed by Paden but not published by Rieger, whose “maximal corpus” does not include popularizing songs in which the woman's voice is not, in her view, an independent one. The difference in numbers and much of the scholarly discussion about what should be included in the trobairitz corpus involves recognizing that, within the troubadour corpus as a whole, we need to distinguish between real women poets composing songs and women's voices singing in lyric, whether invented by male or female poets (Bruckner, “Fictions”). The distinction is easy enough to grasp, but we cannot always be sure where and exactly how it applies in particular cases, especially (but not only) when a song appears anonymously in the chansonniers.

This question of gender and authorship involves a number of issues, first among them the role and character of woman's song and its links with troubadour lyric. The existence of the trobairitz themselves suggests a tradition of woman's song in the south of France, even if it was not often set down in manuscript (Bec, “‘Trobairitz’” 254). As Pierre Bec has indicated, the lady who decides to compose in the aristocratic style of the troubadour has at her disposal a range of female voices from the popularizing genres: chansons d'ami, albas, chansons de mal mariées, and chansons de toile (252-59).

Doris Earnshaw hypothesizes that the energetic and outspoken female persona invented by troubadours (like the feisty shepherdess in Marcabru's pastorela) helps explain both the presence of women poets in the troubadour tradition and their almost complete absence elsewhere in medieval lyric (155-59). Although female personae that appear in chansons de femme composed in different Romance vernaculars generally share the same basic characteristics, the female character who speaks through the Old Provençal poets has to a certain extent been influenced by the characteristics of the male voice. Whereas female speech is typically marked in woman's songs by an incantatory or archaic style, the female voice in Marcabru, for example, is more rationalizing: she is witty and forthright. In Earnshaw's view, it is just such a female persona that invites real women poets to compose troubadour songs, to speak out in their medium.

What we can know with certainty is that men and women were borrowing each others' voices as formalized by different poetic traditions, each combining characteristics of the aristocratic troubadour style with the popularizing woman's song—characteristics that may contrast or overlap in particular instances (cf. Mölk's typology for two perspectives within the popular register, chanson de femme and chanson d'homme, both opposed to the elevated style of troubadour lyric). Bec distinguishes between fémininité génétique, where the poet is a woman, and textualité féminine, where the voice is female but the poet is not necessarily (“‘Trobairitz’” 258). This is a useful and necessary distinction for working with this corpus, but it does not guarantee that a given poem whose attribution is in dispute can be pronounced with certainty the work of a trobairitz or a troubadour. The personae created by identifiable male poets through the autobiographical claims of the first person are constructed as a game that revels in fictional role-playing, however tantalizingly the fictions cross over and play with a reality that can sometimes be historically documented. Even in the sirventes, a genre that frequently alludes to specific circumstances and real people, the poet creates a fiction of himself that does not quite coincide with his historical reality, as the most recent editors of Bertran de Born's poetry have so masterfully demonstrated (Paden, Sankovitch, Stäblein, eds.).

Women poets, no less than their male counterparts, may avail themselves of the possibilities of fiction, whether they speak in a voice identified with their proper name, with their title as lady, or in the typically anonymous voice of the popularizing genres (cf. Zink, “Remarques”). In a corpus like the troubadours', where a not inconsiderable group of women poets can be documented, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that some of the unknown ladies or the anonymous female voices are invented by women. Where there is no specific reason to disqualify “anonymous” as a woman, we have admitted her poems to the trobairitz repertoire, in order to give readers the full range of female voices singing in the context of troubadour lyric. Thus, the alba, “En un vergier” (no. 34), and the balada, “Coindeta sui” (no. 33, also a kind of chanson de mal mariée), give readers access to two examples of this popularizing, anonymous female voice, which may also be observed elsewhere in the balada, “Quan lo gilos er fora” (cf. the canso with refrain, “Quan vei les praz verdesir”).

A second issue raised by the question of gender and authorship involves the way scholars deal with manuscript attributions. As suggested above, these attributions are not always reliable: when do we decide to put them into question for the trobairitz? Ms. T attributes “Na Maria” (no. 10) to “nabietris deroman,” easily recognizable as Lady Bietris de Roman (Zufferey 32). (“Bietris” has also been read as “Bieris.”) Nevertheless, this attribution has frequently been discussed and rejected, because the poem in question is addressed to a lady in a language and style identical to those of the troubadour addressing his beloved. The resulting speculations that ensue include allegorical interpretations of Maria as the Virgin, discussions of possible lesbianism (rejected by Rieger, “Was Bieris?”), and the transformation of the poet's sex. Most recently, for example, Elizabeth Wilson Poe has reanimated Schultz-Gora's suggestion and argued for reading the attribution as a reference to Alberico da Romano. She has, at the same time, elaborated an argument for putting into question the attributions of poems by Azalais d'Altier, Clara d'Anduza, Iseut de Capion and Almuc de Castelnou, based on her reading of the poems themselves and Uc de Saint-Circ's authorship of many vidas and razos. Poe claims that Uc himself, the promotor of trobairitz, would be the poet behind all of these compositions—an argument that William Paden finds unconvincing (“Recent Studies” 111-12).

A sirventes (no. 28) against the defamation of women by antic trobador (old time troubadours), spoken by a woman's voice, is attributed to Raimon Jordan in ms. C. Although a number of scholars have noticed the possible discrepancy, Rieger is the first to include it in an anthology of trobairitz, along with two other sirventes, “Ab greu cossire” (here no. 29, attributed by its unique manuscript R to an unidentified P. Basc and not included in Paden's checklist or Zufferey), and Gormonda de Monpeslier's “Greu m'es a durar” (no. 30). Gormonda's poem, a passionate and angry response to Guilhem Figueria's attack against Rome, “D'un sirventes far” (which furnishes the model stanza by stanza for Gormonda's defense of Rome: see Städtler, “The Sirventes”), was left out of Schulz-Gora and Bogin's anthologies and thus overlooked by Bec in his response to Bogin's edition (“‘Trobairitz’” 237). Although women poets may not have been frequent participants in the political and moral arena of the sirventes, these few examples are precious reminders that medieval women and female voices can be heard even in discourses dominated by men.

The most disputed territory in the trobairitz repertoire concerns the tensos between male and female speakers. When Maria de Ventadorn invites Gui d'Ussel to participate in a partimen (a type of debate poem in which the two parties take up opposing sides on a question proposed by the initiator, also known as joc partit), scholars have no trouble recognizing that the female speaker in her tenso has been invented by a woman poet (though we have yet to determine what may be at stake in that identification). But the list of twenty-six tensos brought together in Angelica Rieger's edition of the trobairitz (twenty-three of which involve male and female speakers) includes many named and anonymous ladies where we cannot always be sure if we are dealing with historical women poets or textualité féminine created by male troubadours. Elias Cairel's historical existence is attested by his vida, but who is Ysabella, named only by the troubadour in their shared tenso (no. 18)? Who are the anonymous ladies debating with named poets like Bertran del Pojet (no. 15), Pistoleta (no. 17), and Raimon de las Salas (no. 24)? Medievalists have frequently pronounced such trobairitz to be fictions.

Ladies who debate with celebrated poets are especially vulnerable to speculations that they are simply literary fictions. Despite her named presence in “Si.us quier conseil” (no. 13) and the razo that accompanies it, Alamanda is frequently declared the creation of Giraut de Bornelh, since only his name appears in the fourteen manuscript attributions that identify the poem with the work of the “maestre dels trobadors” (Boutière-Schutz 39). Rieger has recently argued, on the basis of intertextual allusions and historical clues, that Alamanda, whose name also appears in poems by Bertran de Born and Bernart Arnaut, was a real woman, Alamanda de Castelnau, whose tombstone can be seen at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse (“Alamanda de Castelnau” 47-57). Rieger's demonstration may or may not convince (see Chambers and Paden, “Recent Studies” 109). The three manuscripts that contain “Amics, en gran cossirier” (no. 25) name only Raimbaut, but many modern scholars have followed the suggestion of the Comtessa de Dia's vida and named her as the female speaker addressed only as domna in the tenso. Judging by the power of her poetic accomplishments, Alfred Jeanroy (2: 257) even wonders if she might be the sole author of both voices. Using situational and verbal similarities between this tenso and the Comtessa de Dia's poems (especially the opening line of “Estat ai en greu cossirier”), Walter Pattison (27-30) suggests the process whereby her biographer may have invented the vida. He then uses the same kind of stylistic argument to link the tenso to Raimbaut d'Aurenga's corpus, since both speakers express ideas typical of that troubadour. Judging the lady's wit to be “more in keeping with Raimbaut's other works than those of the Countess” (157), Pattison concludes by giving sole authorship to Raimbaut, although none of his arguments excludes the possibility of a female poet debating the troubadour, whether or not she may be identified with the Comtessa de Dia (cf. Sakari's argument for identifying the domna as Azalais de Porcairagues, “Azalais Interlocutrice”).

It does seem likely that some tensos between troubadours and anonymous ladies were fictional dialogues. When Raimbaut de Vaqueiras debates with a lady, whose Genoese language and earthy style contrast with the poet's elegant Provençal, the resulting parodic tenso reflects most probably the linguistic pyrotechnics of Raimbaut's own art, elsewhere displayed in his multilingual descort (but see Gaunt for a reading that credits the independence of the female speaker). When male and female speakers alternate phrases within the same line, as in Arnaut Plagues and Felipa's “Ben volgra midons saubes” (no. 20), we may find it difficult to believe that two poets have really invented the dialogue for two voices, even though the lady is named in the first of two tornadas. On the other hand, when a tenso between two male poets is recorded with one of them unidentified, scholars rarely raise the issue of fictionality (Gaunt 302).

In the corpus of nine or ten fictional tensos between male and female speakers discussed by Marianne Shapiro (“‘Tenson’” 292-93, 293 n10, 299 n10), most of the designations regarding their fictionality are based on stylistic evaluations, rather than textual or historical evidence: the popular language and humor (e.g. Guillem Rainol d'Apt's “Quant aug chantar lo gal sus en l'erbos”), the obscenity of the speakers (e.g. Montan's “Eu veing vas vos, seigner”), or perhaps the frame supplied by the male poet's opening or closing stanza (e.g. Pistoleta's “Bona Domna, un conseill” [no. 17] and Guillem Rainol d'Apt's “Quant aug”). In a more recent evaluation of debate poems between men and women, Frank Chambers opts for fictional tensos composed by a male poet in sixteen out of twenty-two cases. When names in manuscript rubrics or poems cannot be substantiated with historical information, these evaluations tend to reflect subjective and culturally-determined assumptions about how “ladies” speak or what kind of humor they indulge in. In our concern to explore the gender question in the trobairitz corpus, it is particularly important to avoid falling once again into the trap of characterizing “woman,” whether she is the poet outside the poem or a character within it, as an essence that can be neatly defined and delimited.

Witty insults and sexual innuendoes characteristic of the humor favored in many tensos remind us how the courtly register of lyric poetry plays implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—with the uncourtly. The register of the burlesque has often been excluded from the canon of troubadour lyric, whether in medieval manuscripts or in modern anthologies, and much has probably been lost. Yet, as elsewhere in medieval literary traditions (cf. the Goliards in Latin lyric), the uncourtly functions in a kind of creative tension with the courtly model, defining and sometimes penetrating its shifting borders. If we judge by the scant manuscript evidence, female voices operating in the burlesque mode speak no less aggressively than male ones, as we see in the tenso between a domna and Peire Duran (no. 19). Must we assume that all these female speakers are fictions?

Given that, in a significant number of cases, we cannot determine with any certitude if the female speaker is created by a troubadour or a trobairitz, we may at times have no choice but to put aside the question of the poet's gender and the effect it might have on the kind of fiction created for the female voice. Perhaps our reading of the tenso between Raimbaut and an unidentified domna would not change in any significant way, whether we think it was composed by one poet or two. On the other hand, it may not always be so simple to put aside the sex of the poet, even if we cannot determine which it is. Sometimes it does matter if the author behind the fiction of a female speaker is really a man or a woman. We may read or react differently if we think a piece is written by a man or a woman.

For example, in an exchange between Raimon de las Salas and an anonymous domna, “Si.m fos grazis,” the male poet's three stanzas begin like a canso, with two stanzas describing his lady's indifference and his pain. The third stanza addresses her directly and asks for a favorable glance (no. 24, 19-20: “humil semblaz / vas mi”). In the following two stanzas, the lady herself assures him of her love and puts the blame for her feigned indifference on the shoulders of lauzengier, “una genz enoiosa e fera” (33: “troublesome and savage people”). If we agree with Chambers, who believes this lady is a fiction (since she says exactly what the troubadour wants to hear), we interpret the last two stanzas as a fantasy: troubadour lyric's most intense joys are frequently those of dream and poetry. Raimon may project the lady of his wishes into the “reality” of his song, but that reality remains hypothetical, limited to the confines of art. But what if a real woman poet responded to Raimon de las Salas and played the role of his beloved? Then seeing a lady, too, declaring her love, giving herself loyally and leaving her heart as pledge (“en gauge,” 32), we might interpret the song as proof that fin'amor is not limited to Narcissistic projection by the male lover: mutual love can be declared within the realm of possibilities expressed in lyric (even if that does not happen often). The silent domna may occasionally speak for herself. Of course, this interpretation does not escape the confines and conventions of art; it simply includes more possibilities within it. Do we need to posit a woman poet in order to explore that second reading? What if the song's two voices were both composed by the male poet, but a woman performed the song with Raimon or another man? What if a man or a woman sings both roles?

The possibilities for speculation are endless, and this is precisely the game of fiction and illusion invited by troubadour lyric in general: any one of us can try on the song's expression of love; our own first person will each time move into the place of the singer, make the feelings our own, at least for the space of the song. With this song the stakes of assigning authorship may not seem very high, but elsewhere, especially in controversial areas that involve the balance of power between the sexes, our choices are not innocuous (Bruckner, “Debatable Fictions”).

The high percentage of tensos in the trobairitz repertoire contrasts with the troubadour corpus as a whole, dominated by the large proportion of cansos (only 194 tensos are listed in István Frank's inventory of 2548 troubadour songs). The balance within the trobairitz corpus—however accidental it may be, given the likelihood that many poems have been lost—draws our attention to the way women's voices take an active role in dialogue with men's (in “En Conselh” Rieger gives an overview of the twenty-six tensos included in her edition). It also reflects the degree to which the question of hierarchy and the balance of power between lovers and ladies functions as a major issue of troubadour lyric and a matter of dispute between its male and female interpreters. Where the troubadour's canso enacts through a single voice the reversed hierarchy of fin'amor—though with the power still ultimately held by the speaking poet/lover—the tenso asks questions about that balance of power within the more equal contest of the debate form. Jean-Charles Huchet has argued that the feminine Other (to which he reduces the trobairitz by denying their historical existence) puts into question the fundamental givens of the troubadours' poetic system. We might see this contestation rather as already inscribed in the tenso, one of the major lyric genres, even when it occurs between two male poets. The tensos remind us repeatedly that disagreement, different points of view, and different ideals, are as much a part of troubadour lyric as the shared motifs, vocabulary, and themes that, to an uninitiated public, make so many of the songs seem like the same song. But the introduction of a woman's point of view does make that mise en question more striking—and, especially important, introduces it not only in the male/female tensos, but in the canso as well.

The eleven cansos composed by women include some of the finest lyrics in the troubadour repertoire. In them we can see most vividly how the trobairitz are able to renew the troubadour's poetic system from within by combining in a variety of ways the different personae of women generally separated and fragmented by the male poets—the images of the desiring woman from chansons de femme, the domna of troubadour lyric, as well as the “feminized” “I” of the male poet/lover himself, reclaimed for the trobairitz' own female voice. Through the kaleidoscope of her songs, the trobairitz becomes at once woman, lady, and poet (for detailed analysis and comparison of the Comtessa de Dia's and Castelloza's strategies, for example, see Bruckner, “Fictions”). Whether in the canso, the tenso, or other lyric genres represented in this corpus, we can see the women poets interacting with their male counterparts, setting up a dialogue that demonstrates their mastery and manipulation of a poetic system shaped by the troubadours (cf. Paterson's argument for individuality among the troubadours).

In the context of such a tradition, even when we listen to historical women poets speaking in the first person, we may never hear the direct, spontaneous expression of a “real” woman's voice. The trobairitz, like the troubadours, operate in a lyric whose fiction would have us believe its claims to speak truthfully from the heart. If the song succeeds, we may indeed believe—for the space of a performance. But the initiated public, who appreciates the game of trobar as it was played in the courts of Occitania, cannot forget that each of the trobairitz' songs (re)invents, within the varied parameters of the highly formalized lyric system, an individual voice whose difference can be heard only in interaction with other voices, male and female, from the brilliant and varied chorus of troubadour lyric.

Bibliography

Dictionaries and Grammars:

Anglade, Joseph. Grammaire de l'ancien provençal ou ancienne langue d'oc. Paris: Klincksieck, 1977.

Crescini, Vincenzo. Manuale per l'avviamento agli studi proenzali. Milan: Hoepli, 1926.

Grandgent, C. H. An Outline of the Phonology and Morphology of Old Provençal. Boston: Heath, 1905.

Hamlin, Frank R. et al. Introduction à l'étude de l'ancien provençal. Geneva: Droz, 1967.

Jensen, Frede. The Syntax of Medieval Occitan. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986.

Levy, Emil and Carl Appel. Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch. 8 vols. Leipzig: Reisland, 1894-1924.

Levy, Emil. Petit dictionnaire provençal-français. Heidelberg: Winter, 1973.

Raynouard, François-Just-Marie. Lexique roman ou Dictionnaire de la langue des troubadours. 6 vols. Paris: Silvestre, 1836-44.

Roncaglia, Aurelio. La lingua dei trovatori. Rome: Ateneo, 1965.

Smith, Nathaniel and Thomas G. Bergin. An Old Provençal Primer. New York: Garland, 1984.

———. “Usual Pronunciation of Late 12th-Century Old Occitan as Spelled in Modern Editions.” Tenso 6.2 (1981): 51-56.

Von Wartburg, W. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bonn: Klopp, 1928.

Editions, Anthologies, and Translations:

Action Poétique, 1978.

Albert-Birot, Arlette. “Du côté de Clara d'Anduze.” In Mélanges de littérature du moyen âge et du XX^e siècle offerts à Mademoiselle Jeanne Lods. 2 vols. Paris: Ecole Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 1978; I, 19-26.

Anglade, Joseph. Anthologie des troubadours. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1927.

———. Les troubadours de Toulouse. Paris: Didier, 1928-29 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973).

Appel, Carl. Das Leben und die Lieder des Trobadors Peire Rogier. Berlin: Reimer, 1882.

———. Provenzalische Chrestomathie mit Abriss der Formenlehre und Glossar. Leipzig: Reisland, 1895.

———. Provenzalische Inedita aus pariser Handschriften. Leipzig: Reisland, 1890.

Audiau, Jean. Les poésies des quatre troubadours d'Ussel. Paris: Delagrave, 1922 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973).

Azaïs, Gabriel. Les Troubadours de Béziers. Béziers: Malinas, 1869 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973).

Balaguer, Victor. Historia política y literaria de los trovadores. 5 vols. Madrid: de Fortanet, 1878-79.

Barbieri, Giammaria. Dell'origine della poesia rimata, ed. G. Tiraboschi. Modena: Società tipografica, 1790.

Bartsch, Karl. Chrestomathie provençale. Elberfeld: Friderichs, 1875.

———. Provenzalisches Lesebuch. Elberfeld: Friderichs, 1855 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1974).

Bec, Pierre. Anthologie des troubadours. Paris: 10/18, 1979.

———. “Avoir des enfants ou rester vierge? Une tenson occitane du XIII^e siècle entre femmes.” In Mittelalterstudien: Erich Köhler zum Gedenken, eds. Henning Krauss and Dietmar Rieger. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1984. 21-30.

———. Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours: Le contre-texte au Moyen Age. Paris: Stock, 1984.

———. Petite anthologie de la lyrique occitane du Moyen Age: Initiation à la langue et à la poésie des troubadours. Paris: Aubanel, 1954.

Berry, André. Florilège des troubadours. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1930.

Bertoni, Giulio. Antiche poesie provenzali. Modena: Società Tipografica, 1937.

———. Il canzoniere provenzale di Bernart Amoros (Complemento Cámpori), Edizione diplomatica preceduta da un'introduzione. Freiburg: Libreria dell'Università O. Gschwend, 1911.

———. Il canzoniere provenzale della Riccardiana No. 2909, Edizione diplomatica preceduta da un'introduzione. Dresden: Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur, 1905.

———. I trovatori d'Italia. Modena: Orlandini, 1915 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1974).

Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980 (Paddington Press Ltd., 1976).

Bonnarel, Bernard. Las 194 cançons dialogadas dels trobadors. Paris: Bonnarel, 1981.

Boutière, Jean and Alexander Herman Schutz, eds. Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIII^e et XIV^e siècles. Paris: Nizet, 1964.

Branciforti, Francisco. Il canzoniere di Lanfranco Cigala. Florence: Olschki, 1954.

Brunel, Clovis. Les plus anciennes chartes en langue provençale. Recueil des pièces originales antérieures au XIII^e siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1926.

Brunel-Lobrichon, Geneviève. “Images of Women and Imagined Trobairitz in Béziers Chansonnier.” In Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz. 157-73.

Burgwinkle, William E. Razos and Troubadour Songs. New York: Garland, 1990.

Carstens, Henry. Die Tensonen aus dem Kreise der Trobadors Gui, Eble, Elias und Peire d'Uisel. Königsberg: Leupold, 1914.

Cavaliere, Alfredo. Cento liriche provenzali. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938.

Chabaneau, Camille. Les biographies des troubadours en langue provençale. Toulouse: Privat, 1885 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1975).

———. “Chanson inédite de Raimon de las Salas et d'une Dame.” Revue des Langues Romanes 33 (1889): 107-08.

———. “Die beiden ältesten provenzalischen Grammatiken. Lo Donatz proensals und Las Rasos de trobar herausgeben von Edmund Stengel (Review). Revue des Langues Romanes 13 (1878), 138-46.

———. “Plainte de la Sainte Vierge au pied de la croix.” Revue des Langues Romanes 32 (1888): 578-80.

———. “Un planh catalan.” Revue des Langues Romanes 18 (1880): 18-19.

Chambers, Frank. “Raimon de las Salas.” In Essays in Honor of L. F. Solano. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1970. 29-51.

Charvet, Gratien. “Les troubadours d'Alais aux XII^e et XIII^e siècles: Azalaïs de Porcairages, Clara d'Anduze et Pierre de Barjac.” Mémoires et comptes-rendus de la Société Scientifique et Littéraire d'Alais 12 (1880): 129-51.

Chaytor, Henry John. The Troubadours of Dante. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.

Crescini, Vincenzo. “Azalais d'Altier.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 14 (1890): 128-32.

———. Per gli studi romanzi: Saggi ed Appunti. Padua: Draghi, 1892.

de Bartholomaeis, Vincenzo. Poesie provenzale storiche relative all'Italia. 2 vols. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1931.

de Caluwé, Jacques. Le moyen âge littéraire occitan dans l'œuvre de Frédéric Mistral. Utilisation éthique et esthétique. Paris: Nizet, 1974.

de Casas, Felicia and Jesús Cantera. “La Condesa de Dia y las convenciones sociales.” Filologia moderna 16 (1975-76): 5-19.

Dejeanne, Jean-Marie-Lucien. “Les coblas de Bernaut-Arnaut d'Armagnac et de Dame Lombarda.” Annales du Midi 18 (1906): 63-68.

De Lollis, Cesare. “Bertran del Pojet.” In Miscellanea di studi critici in onore di Arturo Graf. Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d'Atti Grafiche, 1903. 708-10.

———. “Appunti dei manuscritti provenzali Vaticani.” Revue des Langues Romanes 33 (1889): 157-93.

de Riquer, Martin. Los Trovadores: Historia literaria y textos. 3 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975.

Desazars de Montgailhard, Marie-Louis. “Les premières femmes lettrées à Toulouse.” Revue des Pyrénées 23 (1910): 56-91.

Dronke, Peter. “The Provençal Trobairitz Castelloza in K.” In Medieval Women Writers, ed. K. M. Wilson. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984. 131-52.

———. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: Critical Texts From Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Fabre d'Olivet, Antoine. Le Troubadour, Poésies occitaniques du XIII^e siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Henrichs, 1803-1804.

Farrayre, Jean-René. Les chansons de Béatrix Comtesse de Die. Rochemaure: Curandera, 1982.

Faucheux, Christian. “Etude sémantique et syntaxique de l'œuvre de la Comtesse de Die.” Signum 1.1 (1974): 1-17.

Faure-Cousin, Jeanne. Les Femmes troubadours. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1978.

Frings, Theodor. “Frauenstrophe und Frauenlied in der frühen deutschen Lyrik.” In Festschrift H. A. Korff. Leipzig, 1957. 13-28.

Gaubert, Ernest-Augustin and Jules Véran. Anthologie de l'Amour Provençale. Paris: Mercure de France, 1909.

Gauchat, Louis and Heinrich Kehrli. “Il canzoniere provenzale H.” Studi di filologia romanza 5 (1891): 341-568.

Gentile, Galileo. Antichi testi provenzali con grammatica e glossario. Genova, 1947.

Goldin, Frederick, tr. Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères. New York: Anchor Books, 1983.

Goût, Raoul. Le miroir des dames chrétiennes. Pages féminines du Moyen Age. Paris: Société Commerciale d'Edition et de Librairie, 1935.

Hagan, P. The Medieval Provençal “Tenson”: Contribution for the Study of the Dialogue Genre. Diss. Yale University, 1975.

Hamlin, Frank R., Peter T. Ricketts and John Hathaway. Introduction à l'étude de l'ancien provençal. Geneva: Droz, 1967.

Hill, Raymond T. and Thomas G. Bergin. Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours. 2nd edition. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. 1941.

Hueffer, Francis. The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages. London: Chatto & Windus, 1878 (rpt. New York: AMS, 1977).

Jaeschke, Hilde. Der Troubadour Elias Cairel. Berlin: Ebering, 1921 (rpt. Liechtenstein, 1967).

Jeanroy, Alfred. Anthologie des troubadours, ed. J. Boelcke. Paris, Nizet, 1974.

———. Jongleurs et troubadours gascons. Paris: Champion, 1957.

Kasten, Ingrid. Frauenlieder des Mittelalters. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990.

Kay, Sarah. “Derivation, Derived Rhyme, and the Trobairitz.” In Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz. 157-73.

Kjellman, Hilding. Le troubadour Raimon-Jordan vicomte de Saint-Antonin. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1922.

Kolsen, Adolf. “25 bisher unedierte provenzalische Anonyma.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 38 (1917): 281-310.

———. “Giraut de Bornelh, der Meister der Trobadors.” Berliner Beiträge, Roman. I, Berlin, 1894.

Kussler-Ratyé, Gabrielle. “Les chansons de la comtesse Béatrice de Die.” Archivum Romanicum 1(1917): 161-82.

La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste. Histoire littéraire des Troubadours, concernant leurs vies, les extraits de leurs pièces et plusieurs particularités sur les mœurs, les usages et l'histoire du 12^me et 13^me siècle. 3 vols. Paris, 1774.

Lafont, Robert. Trobar. XII^e-XIII^e siècles: Soixante chansons de troubadours situées et annotées avec une étude sur la langue et le texte du ‘trobar’ et un lexique. Montpellier: Centre d'Etudes Occitanes de l'Université de Montpellier, 1972.

La Salle de Rochemaure, Félix de and René Lavaud. Les Troubadours cantaliens: XII-XXe siècles. 3 vols. Aurillac: Imprimerie Moderne, 1910.

Lavaud, René. Les trois troubadours de Sarlat: Aimeric, Guiraut de Salignac, Elias Cairel. Périgueux, 1912.

Lewent, Kurt. “Das Scherzgedicht des Peire Duran.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 39 (1938): 237-60.

Levy, Emil. Guilhem Figueira, ein provenzalischer Troubadour. Berlin: Liebrecht, 1880.

Liborio, Mariantonia. Storie di dame e di trovatori di Provenza. Milan: Bompiani, 1982.

Mahn, Carl. Die Werke der Troubadours in provenzalischer Sprache. 4 vols. Berlin: Duemmler, 1846-53. (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1977).

Marfany, Joan-Lluís. Poesia catalana medieval. Barcelona: Ediciones 62, 1966.

Milá y Fontanals, Manuel. De los trovadores en Espana. Barcelona: Verdaguer, 1861.

Mamino, Alberto. La poesia e la musica dei trovatori. Genoa: Tolozzi, 1986.

Marone, Gherardo. Trovadores y juglares. Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Literatura, 1948.

Massó Torrents, Jaime. Repertorio de l'antiga literatura catalana: La poesia. Barcelona: Alpha, 1932.

———. “Raimbau de Vaqueres en els cançoners catalans.” In Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Anuari. Barcelona (1907): 414-62.

Meyer, Paul. Le roman de Flamenca. Paris: Franck, 1865.

Mistral, Frédéric. “Claro d'Anduzo.” Aióli 167 (1895): 1.

Mölk, Ulrich. Romanische Frauenlieder. Munich: Fink, 1989.

Monaci, Ernesto. Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli. Castello: Lapi, 1889.

Nelli, René. Ecrivains anticonformistes du moyen-âge occitan. Anthologie bilingue. 2 vols. Paris: Phébus, 1977.

Neumeister, Sebastian. Das Spiel mit der höfischen Liebe. Das Altprovenzalische Partimen. Munich: Fink, 1969.

Niestroy, Erich. “Der Trobador Pistoleta.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 52 (1914): 65-70.

Paden, William D., Jr., et al. “The Poems of the Trobairitz Na Castelloza.” Romance Philology 35.1 (1981): 158-82.

Paden, William D., Jr., Tilde Sankovitch and Patricia Stäblein. The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Pasero, Nicolo. Guglielmo IX d'Aquitania. Poesia. Modena: Mucchi, 1973.

Pattison, Walter T. The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d'Orange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952.

Perkal-Balinsky, Deborah. The Minor Trobairitz: An Edition with Translation and Commentary. DAI 47 (1987): 2577A Northwestern University, 1986.

Piccolo, Francesco. Primavera e fiore della lirica provenzale. Florence: Olschki, 1948.

Poe, Elizabeth Wilson. “Another salut d'amor? Another trobairitz? In Defense of Tanz salutz et tantas amors.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 106 (1990): 425-42.

Portal, Emmanuel. “Azalaïs d'Altier et Clara d'Anduze. Poétesses Cécenoles.” Mémoires et comptes-rendus de la Société Scientifique et Littéraire d'Alais 27 (1898): 265-81.

Raynouard, François-Just-Marie. Choix des poésies originales des troubadours. 6 vols. Paris: Didot, 1816-21 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1982).

———. Lexique roman ou Dictionnaire de la langue des troubadours. Paris: Silvestre, 6: 1836-44.

Restori, Antonio. Letteratura provenzale. Milan: Hoepli, 1891.

Richter, Reinhilt. Die Troubadourzitate im Breviari d'Amor. Studi, testi e manuali. Modena: Mucchi, 1976.

Ricketts, Peter T. Le Breviari d'Amor de Matfre Ermengaud. Leiden: Brill, 1976.

Rieger, Angelica. “Un sirventes féminin—la trobairitz Gormonda de Monpeslier.” In Actes du Premier Congrès International de l'Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes, ed. Peter T. Ricketts. Westfield College, London: AIEO, 1987. 423-55.

———. Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik; Edition des Gesamtkorpus. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991.

———. “Was Bieris de Romans Lesbian? Women's Relations with Each Other in the World of the Troubadours.” In Paden, ed. Voice of the Trobairitz. 73-94.

Rieger, Dietmar. Mittelalterliche Lyrik Frankreichs: Lieder der Trobadors, Provenzalisch/Deutsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980.

Rochegude, Henri-Pascal. Le parnasse occitanien. Toulouse: Benichet Cadet, 1819 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1977).

Roubaud, Jacques. Les Troubadours: Anthologie bilingue. Paris: Seghers, 1971.

Sakari, Aimo. “Azalais de Porcairagues interlocutrice de Raimbaut d'Orange dans la tenson Amics, en gran cossirier?” Neophilologica Fennica 45 (1987): 429-40.

———. “Azalais de Porcairagues, le Joglar de Raimbaut d'Orange.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 50 (1949): 23-43, 56-87, 174-98.

Sankovitch, Tilde. “Lombarda's Reluctant Mirror: Speculum of Another Poet.” In Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz. 183-93.

Sansone, Giuseppe. La poesia dell'Antica Provenza: Testi e storia dei trovatori. 2 vols. Milan: Guanda, 1984.

Santy, Sernin. La Comtesse de Die: Sa vie, ses œuvres complètes, les fêtes données en son honneur, avec tous les documents. Paris: Picard, 1893.

Schultz-Gora, Oskar. Die provenzalischen Dichterinnen. Leipzig: Gustav Foch, 1888.

Selbach, Ludwig. Das Streitgedicht in der altprovenzalischen Lyrik und sein Verhältnis zu ähnlichen Dichtungen anderer Litteraturen. Marburg: Elwert, 1886.

Serra-Baldó, Alfons. Els Trobadors: Text provençal i versió catalana. Barcelona, 1934.

Sharman, Ruth Verity. The Cansos and Sirventes of the Troubadour Guiraut de Borneil: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Shepard, William P. and Frank Chambers. The Poems of Aimeric de Peguilhan. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1950.

Simonelli, Maria. Lirica moralistica nell'Occitania del XII secolo: Bernart de Venzac. Studi, testi e manuali, Istituto di Filologia Romanza dell'Università di Roma. Modena: Mucchi, 1974.

Städtler, Katharina. “The Sirventes by Gormonda de Monpeslier.” In Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz. 129-55.

———. Altprovenzalische Frauendichtung (1150-1250): Historischesoziologische Untersuchungen und Interpretationen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990.

Stengel, Edmund. Die provenzalische Blumenlese der Biblioteca Chigiana. Marburg: Friedrich, 1877.

Stronski, Stanislaw. Le troubadour Elias de Barjols. Toulouse: Privat, 1906.

———. “Recherches historiques sur quelques protecteurs des troubadours: les douze preux nommés dans le Cavalier soisseubut d'Elias de Barjols.” Annales du Midi 19 (1907): 40-57.

Suchier, Hermann. “Raimon Jordan.” Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur 14 (1873): 284.

Toja, Gianluigi. Lanfranc Cigala, Liriche. Florence: Olschki, 1952.

Torres Amat, Félix. Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluna. Barcelona: Verdaguer, 1836.

Véran, Jules. Les Poétesses provençales du Moyen Age. Paris: Quillet, 1946.

Vidal Alcover, Jaume. “El plaint amorós Ab lo cor trist: Assaig de restauració d'un text corrupte.” In Miscellània Pere Bohigas. 2 vols. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1982. 85-95.

Zufferey, François. “Toward a Delimitation of the Trobairitz Corpus.” In Paden, ed., The Voice of the Trobairitz. 31-43.

Literary, Historical, and Textual Studies:

Akehurst, F. R. P. “The Paragram AMOR in the Troubadours.” Romanic Review 69 (1978): 15-21.

Anderson, Patricia. “Na Carenza al bel cors avinen: A Test Case for Recovering the Fictive Element in the Poetry of the Women Troubadours.” Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX 2 (1987): 55-64.

Anglade, Joseph. Les Troubadours: Leurs vies, leurs œuvres, leur influence. Paris: Colin, 1929 (rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1977).

Aurell, Martin. La vielle et l'épée: Troubadours et politique en Provence au XIII^e siècle. Paris: Aubier, 1989.

Aurell i Cardona, Martí. “La détérioration du statut de la femme aristocratique en Provence (X^e-XIII^e siècles).” Le Moyen Age 40 (1985): 5-32.

Avalle, D'Arco Silvio. La letteratura medievale in lingua d'oc nella sua tradizione manoscritta: Problemi di critica testuale. Turin: Einaudi, 1961.

Avalle, D'Arco Silvio and Emanuele Cassamassima. “Introduzione.” In Il canzoniere provenzale estense. 2 vols. Modena: Mucchi, 1979. 1: 17-28.

Bec, Pierre. “L'antithèse poétique chez Bernard de Ventadour.” Mélanges Jean Boutière. Liège: Soledi, 1971. 1: 107-37.

———. Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours: Le contre-texte au Moyen Age. Paris: Stock, 1984.

———. La Lyrique française au moyen âge (XII^e-XIII^es). 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1977.

———. “Pour une typologie de la balada occitane: A propos de la pièce ‘Quant lo gilos er fora.’” In Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen: “Farai chansoneta novele.” Essais sur la liberté créatrice au Moyen Age. Caen: Université de Caen, 1989. 53-65.

———. “‘Trobairitz’ et chansons de femme: Contribution à la connaissance du lyrisme féminin au moyen âge.” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 22.3 (1979): 235-62.

Benton, John F. “Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love.” In The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. F. X. Newman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972. 19-42.

Blakeslee, Merritt R. “Apostrophe, Dialogue and the Generic Conventions of the Troubadour Canso.” The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Toronto 1983), ed. Glyn Burgess et al. Dover, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1985. 41-51.

———. “La chanson de femme, les Hérïodes, et la canso occitane à voix de femme: Considérations sur l'originalité des trobairitz.” In Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen: “Farai chansoneta novele.” Essais sur la liberté créatrice au Moyen Age. Caen: Université de Caen, 1989. 67-75.

Boroff, Edith. “Women and Music in Medieval Europe.” Mediævalia 14 (1988): 1-21.

Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. “Debatable Fictions: The Tensos of the Trobairitz.” In Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Strum-Maddox. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. 19-28.

———. “Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours.” Speculum 67 (1992): 865-91.

———. “Jaufré Rudel and Lyric Reception: The Problem of Abusive Generalization.” Style 20.2 (1986): 203-19.

———. “Na Castelloza, Trobairitz, and Troubadour Lyric.” Romance Notes 25.3 (1985): 239-53.

Brunel, Clovis. “Almois de Châteauneuf et Iseut de Chapieu.” Annales du Midi 28 (1915-16): 262-68.

Burns, E. Jane. “The Man Behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric.” Romance Notes 25.3 (1985): 254-70.

Camproux, Charles. “On the Subject of an Argument Between Elias and his Cousin.” In The Interpretation of Medieval Lyric Poetry, ed. W. T. H. Jackson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 61-90.

Careri, Anna. “Sul canzoniere provenzale H (Vat. Lat. 3207).” In Actes du XVIII^e Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, ed. D. Kremer. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. 6: 100-07.

Chambers, Frank. An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985.

———. Proper Names in the Lyrics of the Troubadours. University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 113. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

———. “Las trobairitz soiseubudas.” In Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz. 45-60.

Cheyette, Fredric. “Troubadour Poetry and the Politics of Twelfth-Century Languedocian Courts,” presented at the Seminar on Medieval Literature and Culture, Harvard University, March 15, 1993.

Cnyrim, Eugen. Sprichwörter, sprichwörtliche Redensarten und Sentenzen bei den provenzalischen Lyrikern. Marburg: Elwert, 1888.

Coldwell, Maria V. “Jougleresses and Trobairitz: Secular Musicians in Medieval France.” In Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 39-61.

Courtemanche, Andrée. “Femmes et accès au patrimoine en Provence: Manosque au XIV^e siècle.” Le Moyen Age 96 (1990): 479-501.

Davidson, Clifford. “Erotic ‘Women's Songs’ in Anglo-Saxon England.” Neophilologus 59 (1975): 451-462.

Di Girolamo, Costanzo. Elementi di versificazione provenzale. Naples: Liguori, 1979.

———. I trovatori. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989.

Dragonetti, Roger. “Aizi et aizimen chez les plus anciens troubadours.” In Mélanges de linguistique romane et de philologie médiévale offerts à M. Maurice Delbouille, eds. J. Renson and M. Tyssens. Gembloux: Duculot, 1964. 2: 127-53.

Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

Duby, Georges. “Dans la France du nordouest au XII^e siècle: les ‘jeunes’ dans la société aristocratique.” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 19 (1964): 835-46.

Earnshaw, Doris. The Female Voice in Medieval Romance Lyric. Romance Languages and Literature 68. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.

Ferrante, Joan. “Notes Toward the Study of a Female Rhetoric in the Trobairitz.” In Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz. 63-72.

———. Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Finke, Laurie A. “The Rhetoric of Desire.” In Feminist Theory, Women's Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. 29-74.

Frank, István. Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1953.

———. “De l'Art d'éditer les textes lyriques.” In Recueil de travaux offerts à Clovis Brunel, par ses amis, collègues et élèves. 2 vols. Paris: Société de l'Ecole de Chartes. 2: 465-75. Translated in Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz. 123-38.

Gaunt, Simon. “Sexual Difference and the Metaphor of Language in a Troubadour Poem.” Modern Language Review 83 (1988): 297-313.

Gégou, Fabienne. “Trobairitz et amorces romanesques dans les ‘Biographies’ des troubadours.” In Studia occitanica in memoriam Paul Remy, eds. Hans-Erich Keller et al. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986. 2: 43-51.

Goldin, Frederick. The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Gravdal, Kathryn. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Medieval Women Trobairitz.” Romanic Review 83.4 (1992): 411-26.

Haidu, Peter. “Text and History: The semiosis of twelfth-century lyric as sociohistorical phenomenon (Chrétien de Troyes: ‘D'Amor qui m'a tolu’).” Semiotica 33.1-2 (1981): 1-62.

Herlihy, David. “Did Women Have a Renaissance? A Reconsideration.” Mediaevalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 13 (1985): 1-22.

———. “Land, family and women in Continental Europe, 701-1200.” Traditio 18 (1962): 89-120.

Huchet, Jean-Charles. “Les femmes troubadours ou la voix critique.” Littérature 51 (1983): 59-90.

Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Jeanroy, Alfred. La Poésie Lyrique des troubadours. 2 vols. Paris: Privat, 1934.

Kay, Sarah. Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Kelly, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Rpt. in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 19-50.

King, Margaret. “The Renaissance of the Renaissance Woman.” Medievalia et Humanistica 16 (1988): 165-75.

Kleinhenz, Christopher, ed. Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism. University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures Symposia 4. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976.

Köhler, Erich. “Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poésie des troubadours.” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 7 (1964): 27-51.

Lejeune, Rita. “La femme dans les littératures française et occitane du XI^e au XIII^e siècle.” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 20 (1977): 201-216.

Marshall, John H. The Transmission of Troubadour Poetry. An Inaugural Lecture delivered at Westford College, 5th March, 1975. Watford: Watford Printers, 1975.

———. Trois fragments du chansonnier provençal H.” Romania 97 (1976): 400-05.

Meneghetti, Maria Luisa. Il pubblico dei trovatori. Modena: Mucchi, 1984.

Mölk, Ulrich. “Chansons de femme, trobairitz et la théorie romantique de la genèse de la poésie lyrique romane.” Lingua e stile 25 (1990): 135-46.

Monfrin, J. “Notes sur le chansonnier provençal.” In Recueil de travaux offerts à Clovis Brunel, par ses amis, collègues et élèves. Paris: Société de l'Ecole de Chartes. 2: 292-312.

Monson, Don A. “Lyrisme et sincérité: Sur une chanson de Bernart de Ventadorn.” In Studia Occitanica in Memoriam Paul Remy, ed. Hans-Erich Keller et al. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986. 2: 143-59.

Napholz, Carol. “(Re)locating Lost Trobairitz: The Anonymous Female Voice in Provençal Debate Poems.” Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX 7.2 (1992): 125-41.

Nelli, René. L'Erotique des troubadours. Toulouse: Privat, 1963.

Nichols, Stephen G. “Medieval Women Writers: Aisthesis and the Powers of Marginality.” Yale French Studies 75 (1988): 77-94.

Ourliac, Paul. “Troubadours et juristes.” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 8 (1965): 159-177.

Paden, William D., Jr. “Some Recent Studies of Women in the Middle Ages, Especially in Southern France.” Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX 7.2 (Spring 1992): 94-124.

———. “Utrum copularentur: of Cors.” L'Esprit Créateur 19.4 (1979): 70-83.

———ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Parkes, M. B. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Paterson, Linda M. Troubadours and Eloquence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

———. The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1000-c. 1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Pillet, Alfred and Henry Carstens. Bibliographie der Troubadours. NY: Burt Franklin, 1968 (rpt.).

Poe, Elizabeth Wilson. From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal: The Emergence of the Vidas, the Razos, and the Razos de trobar. Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 1984.

———. “A Dispassionate Look at the Trobairitz.” Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX 7.2 (1992): 142-64.

Pollina, Vincent. “Melodic Continuity and Discontinuity in A chantar m'er of the Comtessa de Dia.” In Miscellanea di Studi Romanzi offerta a Giuliano Gasca Queirazza, eds. Anna Cornagliotti et al. Turin: Edizioni Dell'Orso, 1988. 887-96.

———. “Troubadours dans le nord: Observations sur la transmission des mélodies occitanes dans les manuscrits septentrionaux.” Romanistische Zeitschrift für literaturgeschichte 3.4 (1985): 263-78.

Power, Eileen. “The Position of Women.” In The Legacy of the Middle Ages, eds. G. G. Cramp and E. F. Jacob. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926. 401-33.

Rieger, Angelica. “Alamanda de Castelnau—Une trobairitz dans l'entourage des comtes de Toulouse?” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 107 (1991): 47-57.

———. “En conselh no deu hom voler femna: Les dialogues mixtes dans la lyrique troubadouresque.” Perspectives Médiévales 16 (1990): 47-57.

———. “‘Ins e.l cor port, dona, vostra faisso:’ Image et imaginaire de la femme a travers l'enluminure dans les chansonniers de troubadours.” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 28 (1985): 385-415.

———. “La mala canso de Gui d'Ussel, un exemple d'intertextualité de pointe.”’ In Contacts de langues, de civilisations et intertextualité: Actes du III^ème Congrès International de l'Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes, Montpellier, 20-26 septembre 1990, ed. Gérard Gouiran. Montpellier: Centre d'Etudes Occitanes de l'Université de Montpellier, 1993. 2: 1071-88.

Rieger, Dietmar. “Die trobairitz in Italien: Zu den altprovenzalischen Dichterinnen.” Cultura Neolatina 31 (1971): 205-23.

Robbins, Kittye Delle. “Love's Martyrdoms Revised: Conversion, Inversion and Subversion of Trobador Style in Trobairitz Poetry.” Troubadour Symposium, UCLA. March, 1979.

———. “Woman/Poet: Problem and Promise in Studying the Trobairitz and their friends.” Encomia 1.3 (1977): 12-14.

Sakari, Aimo. “A propos d'Azalais de Porcairagues.” In Mélanges Jean Boutière, eds. Irénée Cluzel et François Pirot. 2 vols. Liège: Soledi, 1971. 1: 517-28.

———. “Le thème de l'amor du ‘Ric Ome’ au début de la poésie provençale.” In Actes et mémoires du III^e Congrès International de langue et littérature d'oc. (Bordeau, 3-8 Sept. 1961). Bordeau: Université de Bordeau, Faculté des Lettres, 1965. 2: 88-94.

———. “Un vers embarrassant d'Azalais de Porcairagues.” Cultura Neolatina 38 (1978): 215-21.

Segouffin, Nanette Paradis. “Trobairitz.” Vent Terral 8 (1982): 35-46.

Shapiro, Marianne. “The Provençal Trobairitz and the Limits of Courtly Love.” Signs 3.2 (1978): 560-71.

———. “‘Tenson’ et ‘partimen’: La ‘tenson’ fictive.” In XIV Congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza: Atti, ed. Alberto Várvaro. Naples: Macchiaroli, 1981. 5: 287-01.

Simonelli, Maria Picchio. “Il grande canto cortese dai provenzali ai siciliani.” Cultura Neolatina 47.3-4 (1982): 201-39.

Spampinato, Margherita Beretta. “Le trobairitz: La fin'amors al femminile.” Le Forme e la Storia 1 (1980): 51-70.

Speer, Mary B. “Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: Theory and Practice.” Romance Philology 45.1 (1991): 7-43.

Sponsler, Lucy A. Women in the Medieval Spanish Epic and Lyric Traditions. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1975.

Stronski, Stanislaw. “Notes sur quelques troubadours et protecteurs des troubadours.” Revue des langues romanes 50 (1907): 5-44.

Switten, Margaret. “Does the manuscript tradition of the trobairitz allow us to sing their songs?” (unpublished manuscript).

Tavera, Antoine. “A la recherche des troubadours maudits.” Senefiance 5 (1978): 135-62.

Thiolier-Méjean, Suzanne. Les Poésies satiriques et morales des troubadours du XII^e siècle à la fin du XIII^e siècle. Paris: Nizet, 1978.

Thomas, Antoine. Review of Die provenzalischen Dichterinnen, by O. Schultz-Gora. Annales du Midi 1 (1889): 407-10.

van der Werf, Hendrik. The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and Their Relations to the Poems. Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1972.

Van Vleck, Amelia E. Memory and Re-creation in Troubadour Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Warning, Rainer. “Moi lyrique et société chez les troubadours.” Tr. Werner Kügler. In Archéologie du signe, ed. Lucie Brind' Amour and Eugène Vance. Papers in Medieval Studies 3. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982. 63-100.

Zink, Michel. La Pastourelle: Poésie et folklore au moyen âge. Paris: Bordas, 1972.

Zufferey, François. Recherches linguistiques sur les chansonniers provençaux. Geneva: Droz, 1987.

Zumthor, Paul. Langue et techniques poétiques à l'époque romane. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984.

———. La Poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale. Paris: Klincksieck, 1963.

———. “Recherches sur les topiques dans la poésie lyrique des XII^e et XIII^e siècles.” Cahier de Civilisation Médiévale 2 (1959): 409-27.