#trobairitz

[nanshe-of-nina]

Depictions of Troubadours and Trobairitz from Bibliothèque Nationale, MS cod. fr. 12473, 13th century

[city-of-ladies]

"According to contemporary accounts, innovations in Andalusian musical genres were accomplished with the aid of singing slave-girls. Arab music may have exercised significant influence in Occitania by the later eleventh century, when slave women captured in raids on Arab towns in the Iberian peninsula were present in Occitanian courts. At the same time, female poets flourished in Al-Andalus, leaving behind them a significant literary corpus. It may be no coincidence that the following century saw the emergence in Occitania of the trobairitz a group of women poet-composers unparalleled elsewhere outside the Arab world(...). For the entire corpus of Occitan lyric texts attributable to women or written in a woman's voice, only one melody survives, that of "A chantar" by the Comtessa de Dia.

Scattered textual references suggest that further melodies by trobairitz have been lost or that they survive without attribution. A prose vida states that the trobairitz Azalais de Porcairagues knew how to compose (sabet trobar), but this intriguing comment must be interpreted with caution, since it could refer to the composition of verse without implying the creation of music. The vidas were composed significantly later than the poetry of the troubadours and trobairitz and are based as much on fiction (in the form of the poetic corpus) as on fact. A reference to the son de n'Alamanda in a poem by Bertran de Born may refer to a composition by Alamanda. Little information is available on the trobairitz performance of their songs; their terse vidas unlike those of the troubadours, do not refer to singing, but several Occitan poems by both men and women refer to women singing.

Despite the meager written transmission of their melodies, the trobairitz seem to have played an important role in Occitan musical culture, as both performers and composers. Conduct literature such as the Ensenhamens of Garin le Brun, which recommends that women sing for their guests, supports this idea. Furthermore, the active participation of Occitan noblewomen in rule and conflict confirms that their voices were meant to be heard. In an important study, Fredric Cheyette and Margaret Switten argue that the well-documented political power of high-born women in Occitan society should be taken into account in evaluating the status of the woman's voice in Occitan lyric. Contrary to much recent criticism that assumes the exclusion of women from power in Occitan society, and thus from troubadour song, Cheyette and Switten demonstrate that" [i] n this society, women were expected to have a role and a voice."

Women could also have performed the female voices in Occitan debate poems; the large proportion of debate poems in the trobairitz corpus is suggestive in this regard. (...) However, Angelica Rieger has pointed out the significance of a miniature representing the troubadour Gaucelm Faidit with his wife, the entertainer Guilelma Monja, standing with her hands on her hips as Gaucelm speaks; she seems to be waiting to respond to Gaucelm's speech with her own half of a dialogue. This image may depict a performance of one of the "mixed" tensos in any case, it represents two known singers at work together, which suggests collaborative performance practice.

Guilelma Monja is the only Occitan female minstrel whose name is known to us; narrative sources refer to her as a soldadeira (or soudadeira) which scholars have often considered equivalent to "prostitute," but Rieger has shown that the term is synonymous with joglaressa a female minstrel who usually worked with a male counterpart. The Occitan joglaressa had a distinctive role and image as a professional entertainer who danced, juggled, tumbled, and sang; manuscript illuminations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries clearly differentiate between the aristocratic trobairitz and the lower-class joglaressa. Guilelma Monja thus represents a larger class of female performers.

Female minstrels and trouvères are also attested in northern France during the high and late Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, female singers and jugglers are mentioned among the entertainers of French and Castilian royalty. Documents from noble and royal households in the fourteenth century list female instrumentalists as well as singers, and several literary texts from this period mention traveling female minstrels. Two heroines, Nicolette (in Aucassin et Nicolette) and Fresne (in Galeran de Bretagne) disguise themselves successfully as minstrels, perhaps suggesting that a female jongleur was not entirely out of the ordinary at the time. Extant songs attributed to female trouveres show that women could compose as well as perform in the high style associated with the male troubadours and trouveres."

Boynton Susan, "Women's Performance of the Lyric Before 1500", Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches

[potnialabyrinthoio95]

A reconstruction of how the songs from trobairitz, the female equivalent of troubadours, should have sounded

[silvergoldsea]

Troubadour/Trobairitz - the ideal job for anyone who enjoys pining/UST/simping

tl;dr / standard disclaimer - I am not a scholar, just a nerd who dabbles in thinking about troubadours occasionally for fun. Sharing thoughts, resources, and snark about this topic below.

If you like longing for someone from afar or otherwise get a kick out of simping for someone who doesn't notice you, consider writing poetic songs. You can sing them in Occitan and be all swoony too!

For those on the fem end of the spectrum, you can be a trobairitz. We don't have a lot of existing records about lady troubadours but there are some.

Trobairitz - Wikipedia

There's also regular degular troubadouring for the dudely folks. We have a lot more of their songs and histories preserved than compared to trobairitz which is not a surprise, but it's definitely a bummer. I bet they didn't mope around about their fair liege ladies as much as troubadours.

Troubadour - Wikipedia

Can Vei La Lauzeta, also known as Quan Vey La Lauzeta, is a very famous song by Bernart de Ventadorn. Two versions are below -- the first in English, the second in Occitan.

What is Occitan, you ask? Well, let me tell you, it's a language much, much more romantic than Latin, that's for sure. The troubadours sang in the language of the people about people, a marked difference from sacred and stuffy Latin masses about God or rough-and-tumble tavern songs (although some of the troubadours wrote pretty raunchy lyrics).

Even Dante dabbled with Occitan which you can learn more about from the below video.

Trobar.org has quite a collection of troubadour music. Some of it is available in English translation, some offer sound samples of the melody, and some you just have to sit back and imagine (or suffer through extremely patchy translation using Google Translate or similar sites). I would literally die of happiness if there was a good translation of Aissi quo - l pres que s'en cuja fugir out there.

I'm not joking about the pining/simping either. These dudes were out there singing shit like this:

D'aquest' amor suy tan cochos Que quant ieu vau ves lieys corren Vejaire m'es qu'a reversos M'en torn e que lieys n'an fugen. E mos cavals i vai tan len e greu cug mais que y atenha, S'ilha no·s vol arretener.

I am so gripped by this love that when I run towards her I feel like I am walking backwards and like she is fleeing from me. And my horse keeps so slow a pace, that I think I'll never reach her unless she wants to wait for me.

All their swooning had a point though -- troubadours brought the concept of courtly love to the forefront. It was a different love than church-sanctified love or familial love, and that was a big innovation for the time. It is likely that these concepts came from Arabic poetry, something that scholars have discussed for many years. Wikipedia frames it as more speculation, but other articles frame it as fact. See Ibn Sina & Courtly Love from a 1952 journal.

Okay I'm tired so I'll conclude now. I hope you learned something new or got a cool new hyperfixation out of my post. <3

[devotedlittlefreak]

Na Maria, Pretz... ; by Bieiris de Romans, a XIII century Trobairitz. (A sapphic medieval poem)

Lady Maria, worthy and truly deserving,

The joy, the wisdom and the fine beauty,

The hospitality, the worth and dignity,

The graceful speech and the lovely meetings,

And the sweet face, and the gay manners,

And the soft gaze and the loving eyes,

These are yours, you’re unrivalled,

I come to you with no evil heart. (1)

So I ask you, if you wish; if gracious love,

And joy, and my sweet modesty

Makes me worthy of your consolations;

That you give me, please, my lady,

What I hope will give me joy ;

Because at your side I have my will and my heart,

And through you, all my delights,

And many times I leave yearning for you.

And because your beauty, your merit, elevates you

Above all, leaving no one ahead of you,

Please, if you wish, and because it will do you justice

Not to love a treacherous man.

Lovely woman, whose joy and virtue uplift,

And graceful speech, I hand you these verses,

Because you possess all joy and delights,

And all the kindness we would request from a lady.

Bieiris de Romans

I will reblog the original text.

I made this translation a few years ago because I couldn't find an english one, it's very imperfect as I don't really speak Ancient Occitan (I was trying to learn it at the time I did it) and am not an historian, but it was sitting in my computer so I thought I'd share it. I got a bit of inspiration from the partial one by Bogin (or so I gathered) on the Wikipedia article about Bieiris, and à french one I can't find back...

Besides Bieiris and Maria's names, there's another reason why it's seen as a lesbian love poem : Fin' amor is traditionnaly written by a man, for a woman. Bieiris highlights Maria's wisdom and graces, and how she loves and value her company. She asks, begs, for Maria's love, she is the only one who can comfort her. E per vos ai tot çò qu'ai d'alegrança could have been translated "And with you I have all that I have left of joy".

And when she is rejected, she leaves yearning, or sighing. vauc [...] sospiran.

Big up to the DOM French - Ancient occitan dictionnary : https://dom-en-ligne.de/index.html

(1) A more accurate (but a bit lousy) translation of the two preceding verse would be :

"Which are all in you, banning anyone to be your equal,

Making me come to you with no evil heart"

[thalieshelen]

19. Musical

[whats-in-a-sentence]

A thirteenth-century female troubadour, the trobairitz Bieiris de Romans, described her passionate love for a woman in her poetry:

Lovely woman, whom joy and noble speech uplift,

and merit, to you my stanzas go,

for in you are gaiety and happiness,

and all good things one could ask of a woman.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[sparklywaistcoat]

“More Than Seguin Loved Valensa”: Gender and Gender Roles in Troubadour/Trobairitz Song and in the Steed-Peel Relationship in Avengers

Another in a series of occasional posts about confluences between medieval culture and The Avengers In a previous post in this series, I told the story of the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (fl. …

More medieval maunderings on ye olde Avengers blogge.