The troubadours are relatively well known medieval figures. They were traveling poet-musicians from various classes who created the fin d'amour genre with its standards of courtly love. Their songs paid homage to unattainable women, often the wives of the kings who employed them. Some famous troubadours were Bertran de Born, Jaufre Rudel and Raimbaut d'Orange.
Yet while there were hundreds of troubadours, there were only twenty recorded trobairitzes. Who were these women and why is their work still important?
Who were the trobairitzes?
The trobairitzes emerged from 1170-1260, in Occitania, in the South of France. They were aristocratic women who composed in the vernacular of Langue d’Oc. During the Crusades many laws changed. They enabled women to inherit fiefs and marry men below their station. Religious influence was also weaker in this region. The most well known trobairitzes were the Comtessa de Dia, who died in 1193, and Na Castelloza. Of the Comtessa, only four cansos, or love lyrics, remain, of Castelloza but three.
Other trobairitzes are remembered for their tensos. These were constructed debates about the travails of desire. One trobairitz, Gormanda de Montpeslier, left a sirventes behind her, the form a rant against political injustice. However, among both troubadours and their female counterparts, the canso remained the most commonly practiced form. As the trobairitzes were high-born women, their subjects frequently either troubadours or knights, their work was often sung by employed singers or jonglars.
Unfortunately, the troubadour culture was a brief one, and for the trobairitzes, even shorter. An oath of 1230 outlawed the vernacular in which these poets wrote. Then during the Inquisition, troubadour towns, like Beziers, were burned. Practitioners of courtly love were condemned as heretics in 1277 by the Pope. The trobairitzes, however, had stopped composing twenty years prior when hypogamy or the practice of marrying higher-born men was reinstated, and their legal gains withdrawn.
Why were the trobairitzes significant?
The troubadours sang about pure, idealized love, in which the lady is placed on a glorified pedestal. They rarely named their muses, other than to dub them with such monikers as Bels Deports or Lovely View. In contrast, the trobairitzes’ poems introduced a sense of the real. Though the trobairitzes do express themes of fidelity and affection towards their beloved, it is not without knowledge of their failures.
The trobairitzes often complain about betrayal, about disappointment in love or sex. Their muses are tangible and difficult, never ethereal. Instead of avoiding the physical, these poets celebrate it or bemoan it. In addressing their paramours, they treat them humanly, as when the Comtessa calls her desired mate, friend or “amic.”
The trobairitzes found many ways in which to disrupt the traditional canso as written by troubadours. Instead of the cliché of a spring setting they would shift it to a winter one. They also effected a tone of openness, instead of the troubadour's pose of “mezzura,” or discretion. Most shockingly, for the era, the trobairitzes often wrote overtly about political and social inequality, urging women to seek vital creative work over the depletions of motherhood.
Long before feminism, the trobairitzes redrew the boundaries of male/female relations; instead of the idealized, the real; instead of the silenced, the vocal; instead of submission, rebellion.Their poems represent a historical shift from women writing as men to women composing in their own voices.As medieval scholar Liz Vanderbilt clearly states, the trobairitzes were “shockingly progressive.”
NOTE: Other sources for this article are
The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours by William D. Paden: 1989 and The Women Troubadours by Meg Bogin: 1980.
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