The troubadours : $b A history of Provençal life and literature in the middle ages
| Language | en |
|---|---|
| First published | 2026-01-07 |
| Rights | Public domain in the USA. |
| Gutenberg ID | #77644 |
Description
"The troubadours" by Francis Hueffer is a historical and literary study written in the late 19th century. It surveys the Provençal langue d’oc and the culture of its poet-musicians, explaining their forms, themes, biographies, and social milieu, and adds a technical treatment of meter and rhyme. The focus is on how courtly love, song, and patronage shaped medieval southern France and influenced Europe. The opening of the work sets out the author’s aim to give the first sustained English account based on original songs, supported by French and German scholarship, while keeping the main narrative readable and reserving technical matters (including metrics and interlinear versions) for a separate section. It then sketches the rise of the langue d’oc—its geography, relation to sister Romance tongues, courtly standardization, remarkable stability in literary use, and rapid decline after the Albigensian Crusade. Hueffer contrasts popular and artistic epics, illustrates the former with Girart de Rossilho, and the latter with courtly romances like Jaufre and, at length, Flamenca, whose plot he recounts as a witty, psychologically acute “novel” of jealousy, intrigue, and clandestine love. He briefly tours narrative and didactic pieces (comic tales, courtesy manuals, a Navarrese chronicle, the Albigensian Crusade song, a monk’s polemical dialogue, saints’ legends, a Boethius fragment, and encyclopedic compendia), and notes the value of troubadour biographies as sources. Addressing claims of lost Provençal epics, he disputes sweeping theories while allowing likely losses, highlighting Arnaut Daniel’s celebrated craft, Italian praise, possible romances on Renaut and Lancelot, and an anecdote of poetic one‑upmanship at King Richard’s court. Finally, he defines troubadours versus joglars and surveys their social range—from merchants’ sons and clerics to nobles and reigning princes—along with their patrons, rewards, and access to great households and ladies; the section closes just as he weighs the moral complexion of these relationships. (This is an automatically generated summary.)