FIG. 4-2 Bernart de Ventadorn, from an illumination accompanying his vida, the biographical preface to his collected song texts
without melodies, in a manuscript copied in Italy in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, by which time the Occitan
culture of southern France had already been destroyed. (Only five of the thirtyseven manuscripts known to have contained
troubadour songs had musical notations.) The manuscript found its way to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris as war booty,
having been confiscated from the Vatican Library by Napoleon’s army. The portrait of Bernart, dating from at least a century
after his death, is obviously fanciful.
Indeed, the actual practice—the actual performance, that is, of the noble songproduct—was usually
left to what we now call minstrels: professionals of a lower caste, singer-entertainers called joglars in
Provençal (jongleurs in French, both from the Latin joculatores, “jokers”); the derivation of our English
word “juggler” from joglar should leave no doubt about its subartistic connotation. Most of the
commoner-troubadours like Bernart started out as minstrels who learned the work of the noble poets by
rote and who later developed creative facility in their own right. The relationship of troubadour to
minstrel, and particularly the means of transmission from the one to the other, attest that the art of the
troubadours remained an oral art. A noble poet would compose a song and teach it to a minstrel, thus
sending it out into the oral tradition from which it might be transcribed, with luck, a hundred years later.
For written documentation of the troubadour art began only when the tradition was already moribund.
The manuscripts containing troubadour songs, called chansonniers, are retrospective anthologies
prepared in the middle of the thirteenth century. (Any song found in multiple copies in these late sources
exists in multiple variants, thus precluding the restoration of a definitive “text,” assuming there ever was
such a thing.) Besides the songs themselves, chansonniers contain fanciful portraits and biographies
(vidas) of the poets. Their purpose was commemorative and decorative; they had nothing to do with
practice or performance. They were “art objects,” rich “collectibles.”
That the composition of troubadour songs was just as much an oral practice as their transmission and
performance is shown by a very revealing anecdote in the vida of Arnaut Daniel, one of the greatest
knightly poets, known for his exceptional virtuosity in rhyme. It supposedly happened at the court of
Richard I (Lion-Heart), Eleanor’s son. Another troubadour had boasted that he could compose a better
poem than Arnaut and challenged him to a contest. The king confined the two poets to different rooms in
his castle, stipulating that at the end of the day they were to appear before him and recite their new poems,
whereupon Richard would determine the winner of the bet. Arnaut’s inspiration failed him; but from his
room he could hear his rival singing as he composed his song, and learned it by heart. When the time of
the trial came he asked to perform first and sang his rival’s song, leaving the latter to look like the
copycat.
Like many of the anecdotes in the vidas, this one probably never happened. (There is no corroborating
evidence that Arnaut, himself a nobleman, was ever in anyone’s employ, or that he knew Richard, or that
he went to England.) But, as the Italian proverb has it, se non è vero, è ben trovato: “even if it isn’t true,
it’s very apt (literally, well made-up)”—and note how the Italian for “making up” comes from the same
root stock as trobar. What is so apt about it, and revealing, are the points the author of the vida took for
granted: first, that a troubadour in the act of composition did not write but sang aloud; and second, that a
troubadour could memorize a song at an aural glance. These are the assumptions of an oral culture.
It was that congruence of creating and performing as oral acts, and that ease of memorization, that
made the minstrel an apt and necessary accessory to the troubadour. Yet because the creation of poetry, as
opposed to its performance, was nevertheless viewed as a noble pastime rather than a profession, it could
be practiced by lords—and by ladies, too. The vidas tell us of at least twenty lady troubadours (for which
the Provençal word was trobairitz) who created courtly songs but never sang them, at least in public.