noncourtly women’s texts were sung in Provençal as well as in French, the Provençal
songs are barely represented in the manuscript sources.
Love here tends to be forthright, sensual, shadowed by pain, and unencumbered with
the artifices of fin’amors; its basic vehicle is the monologue. These characteristics are all
subject, however, to considerable modification.
The genres accommodating the chansons de femme include only one, the chanson de
toile, in which formal definition and feminine interest are coterminous. Elsewhere, form
is not necessarily identified with a specifically feminine experience of love, and
particular experience does not necessarily dictate a given form. A chanson d’ami, for
example, voicing the amorous longing, joy, or heartbreak of an unmarried girl (rarely, an
unwilling young nun), may take the form of a dance piece such as a ballette, or a
rondet/rondeau, or a more freely defined sequence of refrain-capped stanzas. As a
confrontation with an adversary of love, often the girl’s mother, it may merge with a
debate song or suggest the incipient drama of a chanson à personnages; as a farewell to a
lover, it overlaps other songs of separation, the crusade songs, for example.
If the unmarried girl stands, as often claimed, at the heart of all women’s lyric, the
unhappy wife is, in the Old French corpus, even more prominent. These chansons de
malmariée, too, show many forms and variations, including, in particular, a male poet
serving as narrator and occasional interlocutor. An encounter with the poet, for example,
may introduce the woman’s lament; she may be presented arguing with her husband,
debating with another woman, or conversing with her lover.
The aube, or dawn song, though not inherently feminine, tends in Old French as in
Provençal to be the separation lament of a woman, married or unmarried. It is the only
traditional chanson de femme better represented in southern manuscripts than northern
(eighteen to five, not all of which are in a female voice). The French poems show less
formal homogeneity than the others; music is almost wholly wanting in both sets.
Whatever the form of women’s songs, they show a widespread incorporation of
refrains, one- or two-line exclamations that may themselves have originated in women’s
dances. Songs in the high style of fin’amors are extremely rare in Old French, which did
not develop a counterpart of the trobairitz.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: ALBA/AUBE; BALLETTE; CHANSON DE TOILE; MULTIPLE
REFRAIN SONGS (CHANSONS AVEC DES REFRAINS); TROBAIRITZ; TROUVÈRE
POETRY]
Rosenberg, Samuel N., and Hans Tischler, eds. Chanter m ‘estuet: Songs of the Trouvères.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Bec, Pierre. La lyrique française au moyen âge (XIIe-XIIIe siècles): contribution a une typologie
des genres poétiques médiévaux. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1977–78, Vol. 1: Études, pp. 57–119;
Vol. 2: Textes.
Dronke, Peter. The Medieval Lyric. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1968.
The Encyclopedia 1867