Cardenal, Guiraut Riquier, and the Catalan Cerverí de Girona. Poetry continued to be
composed in Occitan, though with little distinction, through the 14th and 15th centuries.
Those who wrote it are referred to as “poets,” not as “troubadours”; they composed
written verse, not songs, for academic competitions organized by the Consistòri de la
Subregaya Companhia del Gai Saber, or “Academy of the Most Joyful Company of the
Joyful Wisdom,” at Toulouse. The rules for this competition were formulated as the Leys
d’Amors, or “Laws of Love” (where love is understood as referring to love poetry), a
massive codification of approved usage compiled by Guilhem Molinier in 1341.
The medium of troubadour expression seems to have evolved from an original one that
emphasized live performance with musical accompaniment and permitted a significant
oral component in performance, transmission, and possibly composition, toward written
composition with or without musical accompaniment or live performance, and with a
correspondingly reduced role for orality. Evidence for such an evolution, necessarily
indirect, includes the fluidity, or mouvance, of both text and music, especially in early
compositions, and the decreasing frequency of reference to the joglar, or performer of the
troubadour’s work.
By the end of the 12th century, Occitan poetry had attained sufficient prestige to
produce a treatise by the Catalan Raimon Vidal called the Règles de trobar, or “Rules of
Composition,” and the tradition was continued, perhaps ca. 1240, by Uc Faidit in his
Donatz proensals, or “Provençal Donatus,” named after the author of a standard Latin
grammar. In the early 13th century, the songs began to inspire prose commentaries called
razos, or “reasons” for their composition, and biographical sketches of the troubadours
called vidas, or “lives.” The ninety-five extant manuscripts of troubadour composition
represent a late stage in this evolution, beginning with the earliest manuscript, dated 1254
in the colophon, and continuing into the 14th century. The transmission of earlier
troubadour compositions into these manuscripts must have involved written forms that
are not preserved, perhaps parchment rolls, and may have involved oral transmission. The
notation of melodies, which is found in only four of the manuscripts, is nonmensural,
taking no account of rhythm or duration of the individual note. The choice of such
notation rather than the mensural notation employed at the same time for other kinds of
music seems to imply that troubadour musical performance was declamatory, that is, that
the rhythm was determined in performance by the singer on the basis of linguistic or
poetic considerations. It follows that performance was probably not accompanied, since
the rhythmic structure was not standardized.
The genres of lyric composition took shape during this evolution of the medium. The
earliest troubadours, such as Guilhem IX and Marcabru, made no generic distinctions but
called their work collectively cansos or vers, simply “songs.” Toward the end of the 12th
century, the term canso, under the influence of the increasing prestige of the theme of
fin’amor, became specialized in the sense “love song,” in contrast with sirventes, or
“satire,” which could be personal, political, or moralizing. Less frequent genres include
the pastorela, the alba (dawn song), the planh (funeral lament), the crusade song, and the
tenso (debate). These terms were integrated into an elaborate taxonomy in the poetic
treatises. The preserved corpus of troubadour songs includes about 2,500 compositions
by about 450 known poets, of whom perhaps twenty rank as major figures. Some twenty
others are women (trobairitz), About 1,000 songs are cansos; about 500 are sirventes;
about 500 more are coblas, a genre first attested ca. 1190 comprising independent
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1762