The First Troubadours

How could a love song become a political weapon? How were scandals, wars and crusades turned into some of the most influential poetry ever written? The songs of the troubadours - celebrities in their day - helped define the emotional landscape of the Middle Ages and left a legacy that still echoes through European literature. Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Linda M. Paterson to explore the poet-musicians who shaped medieval ideas of courtly love, chivalry, gender, power and performance. More: Erotic Medieval Poet: Gwerful Mechain Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/erotic-medieval-poet-gwerful-mechain/id1564113746?i=1000602721468&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2rfNhGjVNeTJR0XmHYnnYa Crusades Against Heretics (Albigensian Crusade) Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/crusades-against-heretics/id1564113746?i=1000679082064 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1lVoVRAffpI5SpHpz3NHUb Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week plus ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 0:40Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 1:19Matt Lewis?

  Let me start the way every good story should start, with a duke, a warrior, a scandal-maker, and the first known troubadour, who all happened to be the very same person. This is the great Lord William IX of Aquitaine. And he didn't merely patronize poets or listen to songs. He was, himself, the singer, the very first troubadour. In 1086, William became the master of lands so vast they eclipsed the holdings of the French king. He was everything you might expect from a medieval prince: rich, feared, mobile, militarily formidable. His excellence in warfare was praised by chroniclers,

• 2:03Matt Lewis?

  and his life took him across Aquitaine, into Iberian campaigns, and eastward on crusade. But what makes him especially significant is that he also forged a new poetic voice in Occitan, a voice that could be comic, erotic, insolent, elegant, and moving.

• 2:23Matt Lewis?

  In 1101, marching toward Jerusalem, William's forces were shattered in Anatolia. Most of his army was destroyed, and he escaped with only a handful of men. Yet he turned the catastrophe into performance, recounting it in rhythmic verse in front of kings and nobles, the first to make poetry from his lived experience, transforming history into song. In his private life, William was impossible to contain. He quarrelled with the church, defended rulers accused of adultery, and was himself excommunicated for refusing to abandon a notorious affair. Yet, he also patronised religious institutions and supported learning in Poitiers.

• 3:05Matt Lewis?

  Later troubadour poetry would often refine desires into idealised courtliness, but William's lyrics are more proud, sensual, irreverent, and politically dangerous. His poems helped define the range the troubadours would inherit. Some are playful and shocking, full of sexual bravado and outrageous humour, but he could also be unexpectedly grave. This is William IX's real importance. He's not just the earliest name on the list. He establishes the troubadour as a poet of individuality, of performance, and contradiction.

• 3:45Matt Lewis?

  Later troubadours would refine the art, deepen it, and spread it across Europe, but William is where it all begins. My guest today is Professor Linda Patterson, whose recent book, The Troubadours, tells the story of the lives and art of these remarkable poet musicians, who, she argues, weren't just performers, but also craftsmen, courtiers, satirists, politicians, travellers, and in some cases, women or merchant or clerics, working in a culture where song carried social prestige, emotional force, and real political consequence.

• 4:26Matt Lewis?

  A very warm welcome to Gone Medieval, Linda. It's great to have you with us.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Hi, it's good to be here.

• 4:29Matt Lewis?

  I'm looking forward to digging into the whole culture that surrounds troubadours. It's such a fascinating period and fascinating topic. So to start us off with, can you just give us the kind of the basics here? When we talk about troubadours, what do we mean? Where are we? When are we? And who are we talking about?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  So troubadours were poet musicians. And the earliest troubadour we know about is William the Ninth of Aquitaine, who was composing around about 1100. The troubadours were composing in a language which we now call Occitan, but people may know more about it and think of it in terms of Provencal. It's a language of the south of France as opposed to the Longue-Dolce in the north of France. And they were active mainly in the 12th and 13th centuries. A few trickle on into the beginning of the 14th. And the important thing is that they were composers who composed the tunes and the words to their songs, mostly.

• 5:29Matt Lewis?

  So as you mentioned there, we tend to start talking about troubadours with William the Ninth, the Duke of Aquitaine. Do we know how and why he begins to turn his exploits into these lyrics to be performed? Where does this all come from?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  There are various chroniclers talk about him coming back from his crusade in 1101. And Sidney's song, the song of which they complain about because they think that they were very bawdy and raucous. And others praise for their wit, but we don't know where it comes from really. That's all we know.

• 6:02Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And why was the 1101 crusade kind of such a disaster? That Guillaume has so much to say about it, William has so much to say about it.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  It was a disaster because he went on crusade, he went to Jerusalem, prayed there. And then when he was coming back, his army just got ambushed in the Anatolian marshes. They were pretty much wiped out. There's nothing in his songs that actually talks about this crusade. However, some people interpret one of his songs as possibly emerging from that crusade. In this, he He tells a story and says that he was wandering about as a pilgrim through the Auvergne. And some people think, oh, well, pilgrim, that means crusader and the Auvergne, maybe he was coming back. But it's it's actually just a kind of funny rude story. As a pilgrim, he's he's wandering about and he comes across a couple of women and he pretends that he's dumb.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  And these women get very excited and they think we've found exactly what we're looking for. Because he won't be able to tell whatever we do with him. So they invite him in, they give him a a nice dinner with a hot with a cape on with lots of lots of thick pepper. They prepare a bath and to have a good time. Uh, then they think, well, maybe this man is tricking us. So let's put him to the test and they get out an absolutely huge ginger cat. They have him naked and they scratch him through this cat from top to toe. And he manages to keep himself silent. So they say, okay, this is fine.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And then the um, the song ends in a big bawdy romp with words which I probably shouldn't repeat here.

• 7:44Matt Lewis?

  We'll do that when we're not recording, you can tell me all about it. And he does, so he's he's well known for these kind of bawdy songs that you say get him into a little bit of trouble. He's frequently very, very rude, but there is there is range to what he does. It's not all just rude poetry, is he? Does he have a variety of styles and subjects that he covers?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  He certainly does. I mean, he actually composed some very lovely, delicate love songs. The rude songs are actually very clever. Um, so there's one which interweaves various levels of meaning and he's talking about dice playing and he's talking about words. Um, but then underneath all that, there's a lot of sexual shenanigans going on. And then he also wrote a very moving farewell to the world. Uh, where he asks the Count of Anjou to am the King of France to protect his son.

• 8:36Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, so there's quite a personal element to that, that sort of last poem, that farewell, isn't there? And a real concern about what's going to happen to his son when he's gone.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  There is, there is indeed, yes, yeah.

• 8:47Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Uh, and so as as this becomes more popular and moves on, you get other names that appear in your book as well. So I wanted to talk a little bit about, uh, Geoffrey Rudele, who I think is kind of this legendary troubadour figure. What do we know about him?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Well, we know that he composed here the six songs which have been preserved. We know that he was from the family of Blé. The Lords of Blé were vassals of the Dukes of Aquitaine. So he was essentially, he was a vassal of Duke William the Tenth of Aquitaine. But he was exiled from Blé for a long time. And so he was, he's known sometimes to modern readers as a prince without a country. And that apart from that, we know that he went on the Second Crusade with the French, along with Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

• 9:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And that's it.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  During May, when the days are long, I admire the song of the birds from far away. And when I have gone away from there, I remember a love far away. I go scowling with my head down so much that songs and hawthorn flowers aren't better to me than the frozen winter. I trust the Lord's fairness in having formed this far away love. But for each consolation I achieve, I get two ills because I am so far away. Ah, why didn't I go there as a pilgrim so that my staff and hooded cloak would be beheld by her beautiful eyes?

• 10:23Matt Lewis?

  And how different is his style to William the Ninth? So if he's growing up in that same kind of area, in that same kind of atmosphere, is he covering similar things or is he different?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  He's extremely different. William is very physical about love. And there's one poem where, which is attributed to him, it's a little bit unsure. But he says he can't wait to get his hands under his lady's cloak, for instance. And there's no nonsense about any kind of distance. With Geoffrey Riddell, he's a poet of amour de l'onge, which is love at a distance, distant love. It's all about desire, but for something really unspecific. And it's so unspecific that people have come up with all sorts of theories about what it is that he's actually desiring. Is it a real woman? Is it a woman of hit imagination? Is it love for the Holy Land? Is it love for Jesus?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Is it love for the Virgin Mary? And you're just left to make your mind up. The language is different too. It's known as from our plan or the smooth style. So it's very smooth and.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Apparently uncomplicated.

• 11:33Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And is this, are we seeing here the emergence of what will become known as as courtly love that's sort of wrapped up in chivalry? Are the troubadours driving that? Or are they plugging into something that already existed?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  That's a good question. Well, first of all, I think chivalry is a difficult word. And I don't think chivalry really comes into being about, until about 70 years later. But if you replace that term perhaps with a knightly ethos, then maybe that's okay. It has been said, and I would go along with it, that the troubadours really invented courtly love. And this is a love which is a man's love for woman mainly, although women troubadours do come in later. The man is in a position of his lady's vassal, and he refers to her as his donda, which is a kind of female equivalent of dominus, in other words, lord. And he serves her and he worships her allegedly.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And he promises all kinds of things in his love, such as constancy and discretion. And he claims to be very timid in her presence and so on and so forth. It's all about longing for something that hasn't happened yet. So it's true that the troubadours later, when they're echoing some of these ideas, they do talk about what they call the sort plus, the rest. But basically, it's about love before anything really happens very much.

• 13:00Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And Geoffrey Rudele kind of gives us a really good example of that around the story of the Countess of Tripoli. How much do we know about that story? What happens there?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  The story about the Countess of Tripoli is an invention of the 13th century. So this is 100 years later. And it appears in something called the vida's, the life stories. In the 13th and the 14th centuries, there were people, mainly in Italy, who were going around collecting, well, they were anthologising the songs that they could find, sometimes with music, sometimes not. And then they were thinking in terms of presenting these to a public, a 13th century public, who were curious about who these troubadours were, just like today. And so sometimes they were able to draw on information that people had been able to collect. But more often than not, they were inventing stuff.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Now, the story about the Countess of Tripoli, we don't really know where it came from, but we only know it had emerged in the 13th century. And the story is that Joffrey went on crusade, which he did. And then, when he was on board ship, he fell ill. And he also heard stories about the Countess of Tripoli, and he fell in love with her without seeing her. So it's, if you like, it's an attempt to explain the Armodne Lonia, the distant love. And the story has it that when he arrived, he'd lost his powers of sight and hearing, but he could still, he could still speak and feel. She took him in his arms and he died in her arms.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  All very lovely, and it's illustrated in some of the songbooks by very pretty illuminations.

• 14:42Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, so it's interesting that sort of a century or so later, people are wanting to build these stories and myths and legends around the troubadours. They're kind of interested in, in who they were and what drove them to write this music, as much as they're interested in the music.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. You're so curious about it. It's partly because by this time, the courts in Italy were imitating the courts in the south of France, which is, we refer to as Occitania, but just to be difficult. So we're talking about Leria from the mouth of the Gironde, going up through Orbanian, coming down to the north of Italy. So it's mainly Italians, but also, this also happened. There were some collectors in the south of France as well. And as I said, the courts in Italy were actually imitating the values and traditions and behaviour of the courts in France.

• 15:40Matt Lewis?

  And another troubadour that you cover in your book is Mercabrie. And I wonder if you could talk us a bit, kind of what does he bring to the genre? How is he different?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Well, he's very different because he's a moralist and a satirist. He, he talks about love in the abstract, but he doesn't think much of it in, in reality. And he's actually a very strong misogynist. So quite a lot of his songs are about saying what a dreadful lot women are, and they're always trying to entice men and lure them to do bad things.

• 16:09Matt Lewis?

  It feels like almost the opposite of what we've been talking about so far, isn't it? It's almost the opposite of that love at a distance and this devotion to a woman.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  He's, oh, absolutely. And I think, well, I've argued this, although it's not totally proven, but I think he's actually, well, he's engaged in discussions with other troubadours. He talks about other troubadours who are completely mindless. And he, he actually tries to define love. And what he says about it is, is actually important for the way that later troubadours come to incorporate this into their idea of courtly love or what they call fina morts. But basically, Martha Bruce's idea of love is, is rooted in marriage. It's, it's the church's line, but he's countering a very powerful current, actually, which is really anti-church. You know, the church is going to want to be supporting the ideals

• 17:00Speaker 01

  of love, which is for somebody who's not your wife.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Girl, I said, sweet pious child, I have detoured from my way to keep you company this day. I reckon it a thing ill-styled that in this place, remote and wild, you tend so big a flock as this, all alone, companionless. My lord, she said, whatever I be, folly and sense I can discern. Your company, good sir, I spurn and leave it to your lady. She has more right to the thing than me, your luckless lady who believed she had it, but is quite deceived.

• 17:50Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, so he's almost like a, like a small c conservative troubadour, which is sort of the opposite of what we, we associate with the, the genre really.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  That's true in terms of ideas and yet he's very innovative as well because he bribes all the different qualities which ought to go along with love and the kind of courtly way of life. Mainly, it has to be said, to do with the generosity of the leaders of the court and he as a, as somebody who depends totally on that, is completely self-interested in that respect. But as far as innovation goes, I mean, he's extremely innovative in language. He's got the most amazing power with words.

• 18:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And do we get a sense in, in some of his lyrics, it feels like sometimes he comes across as quite angry. Does that come out in his lyrics sometimes?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, I, I was thinking about this. I think, um, I think it comes out in his misogyny. But I think the other aspect is that he's, he calls himself a souledier. Um, it's a word that gives us the word soldier. He did actually go to Spain and fight in the reconquest. But whether it was a soldier or not, as simply a hired man, which is what the origin of the word means, that he's, he identifies with a group of basically servants at a court. And he's angry about the meanness, the stinginess of the lords who are having in their power to make their life a lot better. And he's also very resentful of the favoritism given

• 19:21Speaker 01

  to other servants, such as stewards, who have more powers than they do and who get all the perks. So I think that's where his hang, some of his anger comes from.

• 19:31Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting mix. Given all of the different types of subjects that are being covered sort of so far, do we get any sense of, of how these things were performed? Is there like dramatic staging going on? Is it almost like a, watching a play rather than a piece of music?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I think to be truthful, we don't know about that. What we do know is that any performer is putting on a performance. And I think there are a couple of things I might say about Malcolm in this respect. One is that he himself puts on a lot of different persona. The most common one is that of a preacher. And there's a song called Pax in nomine Domini, where he actually starts in Latin. And you can imagine him coming on stage and perhaps performing the sign of the cross as he does it. And then he gives what is a kind of a sermon, but in verse. Other personas are very different. Sometimes he kind of pretends to be a philandering knight. You could imagine gestures, but you simply have to imagine them.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  But there was, there's one exchange where I perhaps bit transperly imagine that they could possibly have done some theatrical staging and maybe use even used costumes. It's a debate between the troubadour, as in Markiplier, so that is troubadour persona, with a minor lord called Audric. And the troubadour complains to Audric that he's too stingy. And Audric comes back and says, well, you're a totally rubbish troubadour. And I can just imagine this being done as a kind of skit, but there's no evidence for this.

• 21:06Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, so you're a rubbish lord, or you're a rubbish troubadour, where you smell worse than me. You stink as well.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes, exactly, yeah.

• 21:13Matt Lewis?

  One of the next people you cover in your book is Bernard de Ventodorn. And you think, is it fair to say that he really gives us this, this crystallized idea of courtly love that we perhaps most associate with this genre?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yes, I think so. I think that's true. So it's, it's a physical love, but with spiritual aspects. But what the spiritual aspects are, it's not a for debate. And it goes along with various qualities in the person, such as generosity and obedience to the lady and discretion to the lady, because obviously her reputation is at stake. And joy and youth and many other things. So yes, I think it's fair to say that he crystallizes these ideas. I suppose the other important thing is that it's, he sees love as a source of not only inspiration for poetry, but also for moral worth.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  That's an important aspect of courtly love, as it's come to be called.

• 22:33Matt Lewis?

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• 23:03Matt Lewis?

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• 23:26Matt Lewis?

  And is it fair to say that you suggest that his lyrics can appear quite simple, but that we ought to think of much more going on beneath the surface, that they're actually a bit more sophisticated than we often allow?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think they are very sophisticated, but he composes in what we call Mithra Valeu, the light style, or the accessible style, as opposed to Markiplier, who composes in the closed or, some people have even said, obscure style, the difficult style. So he's very accessible, so much so that, you know, the 19th century romantics really, really loved him. And he's still very popular today. Recorded, much recorded. What he prizes above all is sincerity. He says that love and poetry need to spring from the heart, but there's a great deal of craft in the way that he gives this impression.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Musicality of the words to go with it, lots of echoes and lots of interesting images, but it doesn't make life difficult for the listener.

• 24:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And one of his most famous pieces is the lark song.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  When I see the lark display his wings with joy against the day, forgetting, fold then fall away as sweetness to his heart makes way. Such great envy then invades my mind. I see the rest take fire and marvel at it for no way can my heart turn from its desire. Ah, I so dearly wished to know of love yet so little learn, for I cannot keep from loving her, who will not have me though I burn. She stole my heart and all of me, and she herself and worlds apart, lacking herself. Now nothing's left but longing and the willing heart.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  It was very much loved. It's really moving and he starts off with this beautiful image of the lark, which is flying up to the sky, which is hope for the sublime of some kind. And then it's so full of joy that it forgets to fly and then it plummets down to earth. And it's an image that he elaborates in the song where he veers between the poles of joy and suffering. And he ends up with a sense of exile from him, of his own identity, from the lady, from his roots in society, and he goes off into exile. It's a lovely song.

• 26:08Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And is Bernard someone else who kind of develops this sort of legendary backstory as well? They seem keen to give him these really humble origins from which he is sprung. How much do we know about the truth behind his story?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  We don't really know anything about that. I think this is just invented. I'm not sure that it's trying to explain the lark, but I think it's just trying to say, who was he? And it just picks up one or two comments in his songs and spins stories about them. I mean, we do know that he was attached to the so-called school of Eble. Eble of Ventodorn was a rifle, friend and rifle to. William the Ninth, and they have, they have various kind of friendly competitions where they try and outdo each other in their courtly extravagance. Bownat says that he, he's so full of sorrow that he no longer will belong to the school of Lord Eble.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And so I think they try and kind of attach him to, to that, that court. And maybe he was at that court, but um, yeah, basically it's just people spinning stories.

• 27:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, but it's fascinating that you almost get this, this fan fiction around troubadours and who they really were. So the people are, are latching on to it. And if maybe we can't write the same kind of music and poetry that they could, you can still expand the world by kind of crafting these backstories for them. It's fascinating that people want to do that, isn't it?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  It is, and you've expressed it very well. Yeah.

• 27:37Matt Lewis?

  And you also mentioned in the book that there are, you probably around about 20 named women troubadours as well. What do we know about them and how does their role in the troubadour tradition differ from men's? Is it the same or is it different?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  What do we know about them? Well, we know a certain amount about them because they're pretty well all aristocratic women who feature in other records, such as Maria of Entadorn. You know, she's a well-known figure. It's clear that such women are important in courtly life.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Someone in the, poet in the 13th century makes it quite clear that women were involved particularly in dialogue poems, songs. And what he says is, well, if you are going to engage in these, just make sure they're not rude. They write in different genres, so they do write love songs. They're also very much involved in dialogues for, which is part of courtly entertainment, basically. And they, they also write serenentes, which were moralizing and or political songs. So it's a big mixture. But the difficulty for them in writing love songs is that. Typically, well, the conventions say that in the poetry, the lady is the one on

• 28:54Speaker 01

  top, as it were, she's the dominant figure, and the male lover is the one who is pleading for love. And this gets reversed in a women's love song, because she's, she's in this position where she's not really supposed to be pleading, but that's what she is doing. So it's awkward for her. And there is also the problem of how is it that a woman can be talking about love in physical terms, which, which they do.

• 29:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, which feels like, you know, during this period, and we talked about the misogyny of some of the, the male troubadours and the work that they were engaged in, and that, you know, the church was increasingly misogynistic during this period. Is, is there something dangerous in what these women are doing, particularly if they're aristocratic? Does this rebound on their, their reputations at all?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Well, you'd think it could. And yet, it doesn't seem to stop them. I thought, if it's all right with you, I thought I'd just quote a little bit from a couple of women troubadours. So Angélique did it in translation, obviously. But one of them, called Azais de Porte Caer Agues, evokes an erotic situation which led René Nelly to elaborate a whole theory around the assange, or trial or test, for a woman. And she says, "Fair love, I have pledged always to be well disposed towards you, courtly and welcoming, provided that you do not ask me to go too far. We shall soon come to the test of this, for I shall put myself at your mercy. You have promised faithfully that you will not

• 30:25Speaker 01

  ask me to do anything wrong." And the Countess of D'ya says, "I would like to hold my knight naked in my arms one evening, for he would be overjoyed if I only served him as a pillow." Da, di, da, di, da. "When shall I hold you in my power? If only I could lie with you one evening and give you a loving kiss. Know that I would, I should dearly love you to hold you." In the place of husband, provided that you promised me to do everything that I wish. So it doesn't seem to have stopped them.

• 30:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's pretty racy stuff, isn't it?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's no evidence that it did rebound on them. It was considered completely acceptable to to preserve their songs in these expensive songbooks. And the illustrations in the songbooks actually show them as as courtly ladies. It doesn't just noble women. It doesn't suggest there was anything bad about them. But then in the 19th century, there were people who thought that they were actually scandalized. And, you know, thought of the Countess de D as a scarlet woman. But they didn't respond that way as far as we know in Middle Ages, not at all.

• 31:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, very interesting. That's a 19th century reaction rather than anything contemporary. And does that, does that almost freedom and that acceptance of that work by women troubadours reflect a slightly different attitude in the Occitanian world to perhaps the rest of the European world? I mean, we famously, I think, we think of it as being a much more kind of liberal and light atmosphere. When we think of people like Eleanor of Aquitaine coming out of that world.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:03Matt Lewis?

  Does it reflect a different attitude to women in particular in that region at that time?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Well, it does seem to, doesn't it? I mean, there are something, I think you mentioned about 20 named women troubadours. You have to look very hard to find any women writers in or women composers lyric at any rate in the north. There were one or two. I think they were actually very important in courtly life. You know, they were, they were people who presided over courtly entertainment.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  And also in the South, I think women, it's a difficult subject, but there were some quite powerful women in the South France. Eleanor, obviously, is one example, but I think the social situation was, you could say it's somewhat different in the South.

• 32:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Unfortunately, we're going to move back to men because we have more of them named, don't we?

• 33:03Matt Lewis?

  One troubadour kind of stands out in particular, there's a man named Arno Daniel, who is kind of, he's praised by people like Dante and Petrarch and famous names that people will know. They sort of seem to appreciate and like his poetry. What do we know about him and why is his work so outstanding?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  What do we know about him? Well, we're told in the Vida that he started off his career learning leplass, which means Latin, and it looks as though he was maybe aiming for some sort of career as a cleric or in the clergy. And then he just abandoned that and he became a jo- a jo-glaire. And he went around singing and composing and he became a troubadour and he was much, much appreciated. But the reason he was so much appreciated then and later is by Dante and Petrarch, is that he's an incredible wordsmith. His craft is just unbelievable, particularly for his searching out of rare words and complicated

• 34:06Speaker 01

  verse specification and rare rhymes. And yeah, it's, I mean, it's all, apart from one extremely rude poem, it's all love poetry, but it's the, it's the craft for which he's known.

• 34:37Matt Lewis?

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• 35:07Matt Lewis?

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• 35:29Matt Lewis?

  Is he innovating with the form? Is he progressing it? Is he taking it further than it's gone before? Sort of finding new ways to use language to deliver these messages?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yes, he is. Well, I mean, it's partly through this search for Rev Cavalry. But perhaps I could just give you an example of a form that he invented, which is picked up later by Italian poets. They called it a cestina. He didn't call it that, but that's what it is. And it involves six stanzas and a couple of lines at the end picking up the last, picking up the last bit. And in each stanza, he ends, he ends each line with a word, a rhyme word. So there are six different rhyme words. And then in the next stanza, he picks them up again, but in a different order. And so on in six stanzas.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  So it's, my, my husband actually looked into this because I was trying to get a sort of mathematical explanation for what was going on. And he, he kind of compared it with, with bell ringing and the, I can't remember what it's called. It's the, the round bob or something. But anyway, it's, it's a very, it means that you come back to the same pattern. You would come back to the same pattern at the end if you started again after the end of the six stanza. And in the, the final two lines, he just incorporates those six rhyme words. So it's tout de fond.

• 36:54Matt Lewis?

  And I wonder if we could talk a little bit as well. And maybe we can bring in Bertrand de Bourne as, as our example to talk about this. But to what extent does, does the politics of the day affect what troubadours are, are writing and singing about? And as an extension of that, kind of how reasonable is it to use someone like Bertrand de Bourne as almost historical source material for what's going on and attitudes to, to politics of the day?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Well, to a vast extent. There's a whole genre called the sirentes, which is hardly preserved in the north among the prouvaires, speaking in French as opposed to Occitan. But yes, there are hu- hu- vast numbers of political poems. And yes, I think it's. Obviously with any source, you're going to have to take account of all sorts of things. I think it's with the troubadours, there are details which can emerge which you wouldn't otherwise know about, particularly in Bertrand de Bourg. Historians have had recourse to this. There are names that he mentioned who can be identified through other sources and you can

• 38:02Speaker 01

  form a bigger picture of what their role was, what they were doing, who they were associated with. Particularly though, I think you can use the troubadours, if that's not the wrong word, to get an idea of a public response to events such as the Crusades.

• 38:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, interesting. So it's almost like watching a satirical news programme today. You know, we might watch something that comments on the news and makes a bit of fun of it and make light of it, or makes obscure references to it. That's kind of what the troubadours are doing.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  That's a very good way of putting it, although sometimes it's extremely serious. And when Bertrand de Bourg is criticizing leaders of the Crusade for not getting on with it and just delaying and delaying, when, you know, when we've heard that Jerusalem has fallen. Oh, I hope I've got my dates right there. But yeah, in response to dreadful events that are going on in the Holy Land, he's goading them, he's prompting them, and it's quite serious. So yeah, satire but also serious. Other sorts of events that come into this might be the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, for instance, in the 13th century. There's a lot of troubadour responses to that. And a lot of it is propaganda.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Partly, you can see that Frederick III, Heinrich Stalfen, is actually, he has a whole propaganda machine going. And troubadours can be part of that.

• 39:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And unlike Arno that we talked about earlier, Bertrand attracts attention from Dante, who kind of complains about him and says, you know, he's out there sowing discord with the work that he's doing. Is that a fair assessment by Dante or is he being a bit mean?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  He's not being mean, he's been quite truthful. Bertrand was a sour of discord. He says he likes it when war is happening because, well, first of all, I mean, first of all, he foments discord because he's actually trying to get people on his side in local wars that he's involved in and he's trying to protect his own castle. But more than that, he loves people being at war because it makes the top people a lot friendlier. It means he can hobnob with people like Richard the Lionheart and the young king, Henry of England. And there are lots of courts and lots of free spending and drinking and feasts and celebrating the courtly way of life. And so, yeah, he thinks discord is great.

• 40:25Matt Lewis?

  Good for business. We also have a word that cropped up a little bit earlier is a jongleur. And I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about how a jongleur is different from a troubadour and whether people sort of moved between the two spheres.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  I mean, it's an arguable area, but it makes sense to see a jongleur as somebody who performs and a troubadour as somebody who composes. And certainly you can be the same person. But you could primarily start off your life going around singing other people's songs and then you could start composing yourself. And that is the story that's told about Alain Daniel. So yes, you could certainly go from one to the other.

• 41:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, interesting.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  And maybe to give a rather different kind of example, well, this is a change, a different change of status. And that is Reinbart de Vakeras, who started as a troubadour, a very fine troubadour, but he became, he became the troubadour and friend of Bonifas, the first of Montfort, who was a leader at the Fourth Crusade. And Bonifas, this was a very rare thing. I mean, troubadours really hoped that the rich would promote them in some way or give them lots of nice gifts. But what Bonifas did was he made, he made Reinbart a knight, he knighted him.

• 41:44Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  So that's certainly a change of status, yeah.

• 41:49Matt Lewis?

  And how does, or how did troubadour culture kind of change with the status of the singer? And I'm thinking mostly here in the book of Falca de Marsala in particular.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Falca de Marsala, yeah. Well, you could say that Falca started off being a troubadour as well as being the son of a merchant and so on. And he ended up as a bishop. And when he became a bishop, he felt very embarrassed about having Dallied around with these silly troubadour love songs, but as far as troubadour culture went, Falca sided with the French and the church in their invasion of the south during the Albigensian Crusade, which was started to allegedly to extirpate the Cathar heresy and other heresies. But it basically had ended up being a war of conquest. And

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Falca was bishop of Toulouse, and he played a really pretty despicable role, actually, from a troubadour's point of view and the locals' point of view, in tricking the citizens to accept the rule of the French, claiming that they would all keep their lands and they'd all, you know, life would just carry on as before. And as soon as he got them in his power, they were all sent off into exile. I mean, he was only important for a change, change in troubadour culture, because apart from anything else, a lot of the troubadours started lambasting the church and the French and the crusaders.

• 43:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's an interesting case, isn't it? Because he's a troubadour who, being a troubadour, sort of opens the doors to social progression for him. He ends up as a bishop, who, as you say, is almost embarrassed of his origins, despite the fact that that's how he got there. But then he also turns into someone who is effectively attacking Occitan culture and the Occitan way of living and trying to see that subsumed into a more northern French way of doing things. He's almost, he's poacher turned gamekeeper almost, isn't he?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Well, he is. I wouldn't say that, that having, I don't think there's a direct link between him getting an introduction to powerful people in the south through his songs. I don't think there's a link between that and then becoming a bishop. I think that the two things are quite separate, actually. But he certainly becomes, yes, you could say he becomes, he's a poacher turned gamekeeper. He's not, I'm afraid, he's not a very attractive figure. But then I'm kind of on the side of the troubadours, aren't I?

• 44:23Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely. We'll leave him behind. He can be the bad guy of our story.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:27Matt Lewis?

  And to what extent do we we see an end to the troubadour tradition? Does it finish? Or does it sort of subside a little bit? Does it go quietly or slowly?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  We don't have any troubadour songs in Occitan after the the very beginning of the 14th century. So you could say that it subsides in that sense. I mean, it it gains new life by it being absorbed into Italian in in the Dolce Stilnovalo and Dante's Dante's lyrics. And in the whole courtly love lyric, courtly lyric tradition, in that sense, it doesn't die, but it gets transformed.

• 45:06Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Are we able to see a kind of a direct influence on people like Dante from the troubadour tradition and their interest in it?

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Oh, well, certainly. Yes, yes. Dante, in his youth, he wrote, well, when he was comparatively young, he wrote a treatise in Latin called the De Vulgari Eloquentia on on vernacular eloquence. And he's he's arguing for the the status of the vernacular as a vehicle for the highest form of poetry. And he talks about there being three traditions here. There's the language of Oc, the language of Aria, and the language of C. The language of Oc is Occitan, because it's the way that people said yes in Occitan. The language of Aria is Old French, and the language of C is Italian. And then he cites various authorities, authoritative figures,

• 45:58Speaker 01

  including people like Al, Dan, Daniele and so on. So, I mean, he's he's very clearly deeply influenced by the troubadours. And this, and you can see this in in his Divine Comedy, for instance, as well as the lyrics.

• 46:13Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating and I really feel like I'm going to go away and have to read some of the ruder versions of poetry that we can't talk about on air. But I wonder before we finish, whether you think there is a real lasting legacy to the troubadour movement. What is its legacy?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  That's such a difficult question. I think it's, I think it brought ways of talking about love which have persisted. And there were people in the 19th century who complained about this. They complained, they complained about simple minded women who had internalised

• 46:50Speaker 01

  thoughts about love adventure, which didn't do society much good at all.

• 46:56Matt Lewis?

  I feel like most of the troubadours would be quite happy to feel like they were a bad influence seven or 800 years later.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  I think so. I think they're also a good influence in their values. I think there were many positive values which belonged to them. There are lots of people nowadays who like to think of themselves as troubadours. And there are lots of people who record the troubadours and, you know, there are lots of CDs and so on with different ways of performing them. Of course, that's a whole other question. How do you perform the music that you find written down in the manuscripts? But that's a different issue.

• 47:30Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. But it's fascinating to think of an art form sort of launched by a Duke of Aquitaine 900 years ago that is still around today, that is still influencing popular culture today.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so. Yes. Of course, I wouldn't call troubadours necessarily popular culture, but I think they've become more that. Yeah.

• 47:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this, Linda. People can go and find your book and learn far more about the troubadours than we've been able to cover. But this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Matt.

• 48:06Matt Lewis?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, you can find plenty about Eleanor of Aquitaine in our back catalogue, as well as an episode on the Albigencian Crusade that we mentioned, and one on Welsh female poets. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.