earliest known French lyrics, the 150-year span of the trouvère repertory closes with the
abandonment of its principal genres, the emergence of “fixed” forms, and the advent of a
verbal lyricism not tied to music.
About half the corpus shows some kind of authorial ascription, but many of the
roughly 250 trouvères identified are otherwise unknown; many of the attributions are
uncertain; and the distribution is extremely uneven, running from over 130 trouvères
credited with one or two pieces each to only a dozen with more than twenty, but four of
these—Gace Brulé, Thibaut de Champagne, Jehan Bretel, and Adam de la Halle—with
upward of sixty. Socially, the trouvères were quite diverse, including men better
remembered for other literary achievements, such as Chrétien de Troyes (the earliest
known composer of lyric in French), Guiot de Provins, Richard de Fournival, and Adam
de la Halle; powerful feudal lords, such as Thibaut de Champagne; and even artists who
doubled as itinerant jongleurs, such as Colin Muset and Rutebeuf. But most of them seem
to have belonged to some rank of the nobility, especially in the early, “classical,” decades
that produced illustrious figures like Blondel de Nesle, Gace Brulé, and the Châtelain de
Coucy; or, particularly in the 13th century, to the bourgeoisie of the commercial north, a
group including, among others, Guillaume le Vinier, Jehan Bretel, and Perrin
d’Angicourt, as well as Adam de la Halle. Though the activity of the first group was
centered in aristocratic courts, the artistic arena of the trouvères of Artois and Picardy
tended to be poetic guilds (puys or confréries), notably the Puy d’Arras. Communication
among the court-centered trouvères appears to have been just as intense as among the
bourgeois, and to a great extent the two milieux were in contact with each other,
elaborated the same lyric themes, and cultivated the same genres.
With few exceptions, their subject was love, and in the first-person chanson d’amour,
or grand chant courtois, which celebrated—but less ecstatically—much the same courtly
idea of true love that the troubadours had developed as fin’amors, they brought to the
subject a high seriousness that made the genre, like the troubadours’ canso, the ultimate
expression of their artistic abilities. They sang of amorous longing and of the interplay
between desire and creativity in terms that, for all their depersonalizing abstractness and
conventional vocabulary, could yet reveal individual inventiveness, even virtuosity, and
communicate an intense human experience. Different from the canso—never venturing
into the hermeticism of trobar clus, for example, and veering away from the southern
emphasis on joy, youth, and the power of love and the beloved to refine the sensibilities
of the lover—the grand chant is nevertheless of the same genre and clearly a product of
Provençal inspiration.
The prosody of the grand chant, as of the other genres, with the notable exception of
the lai-descort, allows great freedom within the fundamental constraint of isostrophic
form: that all stanzas be set to the same melody and therefore show not only the same
number of lines but also an unvarying succession of (syllabically measured) line lengths.
Most poems are five or six stanzas long, with stanzas normally comprising eight to ten
lines and lines tending to be hepta-, octo-, or decasyllabic. Isometric stanzas are more
usual than heterometric, which, though frequent, are more restrained in shape than the
heterometric stanzas of lighter genres, such as the pastourelle. As for homophony, it is
rhyme rather than assonance. Rhyme scheme reveals much the same stanza-to-stanza
invariability as line-length succession, though the array of rhyme words in a given text
rarely shows any repetition. The rhymes themselves, that is, the sounds that rhyme, may
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1764