PASTOURELLE/PASTORELA
. Medieval lyric genre that developed in the 12th century in Occitan (pastorela),
flourished during the 13th in French (pastourelle), and was imitated in Latin, German,
Italian, Galician-Portuguese, Castilian, English, Welsh, Gascon, and Franco-Provençal; it
survives in folksongs in various languages. The word means “shepherdess,” by
synecdoche “poem about a shepherdess”; the French form reveals linguistic influence
from Occitan in the retention of the s (cf. French pâtre ‘shepherd’) and in the treatment of
the stressed vowel (cf. French pasteur).
In the most frequent type, a male speaker narrates his encounter with a young woman,
often a shepherdess, and his attempt to seduce her. The prototype by Marcabru, L’autrier
jost’una sebissa, combines elements that are found in medieval Latin compositions and in
scattered analogues in other languages (in Chinese, in the Romance of the kharjas,
perhaps in French); the dialogue follows the man’s increasing efforts at hyperbole, and
ends with the girl mocking him in his defeat. The context of Marcabru’s other satires
invites reading the man as a symbol of the decadence of courtly culture (perhaps as a
figure of Guilhem IX, the first troubadour), and the girl as a representative of sound
peasant morality. Marcabru’s tone evolved quickly into the erudite libertinage of Walter
of Châtillon’s Ovidian pastourelles. The French poems, many of them anony-mous, run
the gamut from sexual farce to rape. In the late 13th century, Guiraut Riquier created a
series of pastourelles in which he meets the same shepherdess six times over a period of
more than twenty years, and the genre entered the dolce stil nuovo with Guido Cavalcanti
and Dante. In the serranillas of the Libro de buen amor, Juan Ruiz turned the
shepherdess into a folkloric wildwoman of autochthonous strength.
Related forms include the augmented pastourelle, in which the cast of characters is
increased by adding a peasant lover who often drives the narrator away; the bergerie, in
which the narrator encounters peasants dancing or quarreling; and the pastoureau, in
which he talks with a shepherd.
William D.Paden
Audiau, Jean, ed. La pastourelle dans la poésie occitane du moyen âge. Paris: Boccard, 1923.
Bartsch, Karl, ed. Romances et pastourelles françaises des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: Altfranzösische
Romanzen und Pastourellen. Leipzig: Vogel, 1870.
Paden, William D., ed. and trans. The Medieval Pastourelle. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1987.
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, pp. 119–36.
Zink, Michel. La pastourelle: poésie et folklore au moyen âge. Paris: Bordas, 1972.
PATHELIN, FARCE DE MAISTRE
. Written in the 1460s, Pathelin is the earliest of the many farces surviving from the late-
medieval period. It is unusual in both its length and its complexity. The play’s 1,600
octosyllabic lines make it twice as long as any other farce and three times longer than the
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