vidame thus resembled the avoué of a monastery. The position soon became a hereditary
fief, with a bishop’s vidame being one of the important nobles of the diocese.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: ADVOCATUS/AVOUÉ]
VIDAS AND RAZOS. Commonly referred to jointly as the “biographies of the troubadours,” the Provençal
vidas and razos are brief accounts in prose. The vidas were rarely more than a few
sentences long, reporting who the troubadour was, whence he came, whom he loved,
what kind of songs he composed, and where he died; the razos (“reasons”), usually
several paragraphs long, attempted to explain how a given troubadour happened to write
a certain song. Vidas survive for about a hundred troubadours; razos, for about twenty-
five.
The vidas and razos are preserved in some twenty chansonniers, most of which were
compiled in northern Italy. Four of these collections date from the 13th century; virtually
all the rest, from the 14th. In the 13th-century manuscripts, the vidas and razos are placed
immediately before (or, in the case of the nineteen Bertran de Born razos, immediately
after) the poem or poems to which they pertain; in the 14th-century codices, the
biographical texts stand detached from the poems, in a section unto themselves.
Two of the biographies are signed: the vida for Peire Cardenal, by a certain Miquel de
la Tor, and one of the razos for Savaric de Mauleon, by the troubadour Uc de Saint-Circ,
who identifies himself as having written estas razos. The common errors, cross-
references, and stylistic similarities among the texts make it apparent that there was one
primary biographer, undoubtedly Uc. Even if Uc “wrote” the biographies, he did not
necessarily invent them. The abundance of accurate geographical detail in the vidas
suggests that they were composed originally by jongleurs, who, as traveling performers,
knew the southern French countryside well and who would have invented these narratives
on the spot as a means of enlivening their recital of troubadour songs.
The vidas and razos follow a variety of narrative patterns: some resemble miniature
saints’ lives; others are like fabliaux; still others are reminiscent of the Latin accessus ad
auctores; most of them are simply humorous expansions on metaphors drawn from
troubadour poems.
Both the virtual absence of razos (with the exception of those pertaining to Bertran de
Born) from the earliest chansonniers and the relative narrative simplicity of the typical
vida compared with the razo made scholars for a long time assume that the vidas
predated the razos. The opposite, however, is true. None of the information reported in
the razos postdates the year 1219, whereas some of what is contained in the vidas does.
Uc did not produce the razos as a single block. He wrote the razos for Bertran de Born
first. These texts remained detached from the others. Uc referred to them once in a razo
about Folquet de Marseille as l’autr’escrit, thus acknowledging that he wrote them at an
earlier time.
The distinction between vida and razo is not always clear-cut. There are at least a
dozen mixed texts spread throughout the chansonniers. Within the biographies
themselves, the term razo is applied indiscriminately and the word vida never occurs as a
The Encyclopedia 1803