[See also: CISTERCIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE; SÉNANQUE; THORONET,
LE]
Esquieu, Yves. “L’abbaye de Silvacane.” Congrès archéologique (Le pays d’Aix) 143(1985):284–
96.
Fixot, Michel, and Jean-Pierre Pelletier. “Découvertes archéologiques récentes à l’abbaye de
Silvacane.” Congrès archéologique (Le pays d’Aix) 143(1985):297–99.
Pontus, Paul. L’abbaye de Silvacane. Paris: CNMHS, 1982.
SIRVENTES
. An Occitan lyric genre including personal invective, political satire, and moralizing
verse, contrasted with the dominant canso, or love song. Etymologically, sirventes means
“servantlike.” This meaning may have been applied literally to satirical songs because
they were sung by servants (Rieger), but historical evidence is weak. We have firmer
grounds for a figurative interpretation: the sirventes was considered the “servant” of the
canso because the poet composing one would adopt a preexisting canso’s metrical form.
The sirventes could then be sung to the melody of the canso, facilitating its diffusion. The
sirventes is thus an example of contrafacture, or melodic appropriation, a special kind of
intertextuality.
Such imitation developed gradually. The first great satirist among the troubadours,
Marcabru, never used the term sirventes but called his own songs vers; in only one poem
is it certain that he imitated a form by another poet, and he did so in an answer to his
model. The word sirventes was first applied to the text that contained it ca. 1150 by the
minor Gascon troubadour Marcoat, who seems to refer to contrafacture. Bertran de Born,
ca. 1180–1200, practiced demonstrable imitation in about one-third of his sirventes
(calling them by this name, though he used no generic term for his love songs), and
extended imitation to include the choice of rhyme sounds as well as stanzaic shape. In the
13th century, Peire Cardenal composed at least 80 percent of his sirventes in imitative
forms. All in all, about two-thirds of the 500-odd extant sirventes are demonstrable
imitations. In troubadour practice, imitation was never obligatory; a sirventes could have
a new melody or could imitate a song that was of a genre other than the canso, even
another sirventes. Imitation became the rule for composition of sirventes in treatises
written in the late 13th and 14th centuries (Doctrina de compondre dictats, Leys
d’Amors).
Subgenres include the sirventes-joglaresc, or sirventes addressed to a joglar, which is
mentioned several times among the vidas; the sirventes-ensenhamen, in which a
troubadour lists the repertory that a joglar should know; and the canso-sirventes, in
which themes of satire and love are commingled and which is named once in a song by
Folquet de Romans. None of these narrower types achieved the well-established generic
status of the sirventes.
William D.Paden
[See also: BERTRAN DE BORN; MARCABRU; PEIRE CARDENAL;
TROUBADOUR POETRY]
The Encyclopedia 1667