Troubadour Lyric in a Global Poetics: Creating Worlds Through Desire

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter discusses how troubadour verse established paradigms for world poetry. The art was at once highly local (in its feudal and religious context) and global in the sense of its reach, immediate vitality, and adaptability of its various combinations of meter, themes, and language. This language of courtliness created a coded world of political relations, people, and places; a world that allowed for moral criticism based on a cultivated reflection on the properties of language; for various formulations concerning desire, exile, and poetic craftsmanship. Verse forms such as thesestinaand thealbaoffer models for understanding the place of the troubadours in world poetry from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Finally, the works of women troubadours (trobairitz) show how female voices negotiated their status within the homogeneous art form and attest to the complexity and richness of troubadour lyric.