The Troubadours

The Troubadours

Author: Simon Gaunt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-06-28

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1316582620

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The dazzling culture of the troubadours - the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed - fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly-commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.


Proensa

Proensa

Author: George Economou

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1681370301

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It was out of medieval Provence—Proensa—that the ethos of courtly love emerged, and it was in the poetry of the Provençal troubadours that it found its perfect expression. Their poetry was also a central inspiration for Dante and his Italian contemporaries, propagators of the modern vernacular lyric, and seven centuries later it was no less important to the modernist Ezra Pound. These poems, a source to which poetry has returned again and again in search of renewal, are subtle, startling, earthy, erotic, and supremely musical. The poet Paul Blackburn studied and translated the troubadours for twenty years, and the result of that long commitment is Proensa, an anthology of thirty poets of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, which has since established itself not only as a powerful and faithful work of translation but as a work of poetry in its own right. Blackburn’s Proensa, George Economou writes, “will take its place among Gavin Douglas’ Aeneid, Golding’s Metamorphoses, the Homer of Chapman, Pope, and Lattimore, Waley’s Japanese, and Pound’s Chinese, Italian, and Old English.”


A Walking Tour in Southern France

A Walking Tour in Southern France

Author: Ezra Pound

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9780811212236

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Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a cache of notebooks dating back to the summer of 1912, when as a young man he had walked the troubadour landscape of southern France. Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of "Walking Tour 1912", editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound's footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. "What this peripatetic editing process...revealed", he writes, "was a remarkably readable account of a journey in search of the vanished voices of Provence that at the same time chronicled Pound's gradual discovery of himself as a modernist poet...".


A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Troubadours and Old Occitan Literature

A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Troubadours and Old Occitan Literature

Author: Robert A Taylor

Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications

Published: 2015-10-02

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 1580442080

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Although it seemed in the mid-1970s that the study of the troubadours and of Occitan literature had reached a sort of zenith, it has since become apparent that this moment was merely a plateau from which an intensive renewal was being launched. In this new bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature, Robert Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the fifteenth-century works of Occitano-Catalan poet Jordi de Sant Jordi - and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor includes articles on related topics such as practical approaches to the language of the troubadours and the musicology of select troubadour songs, as well as articles situated within sociology, religious history, critical methodology, and psychoanalytical analysis. Each listing offers descriptive comments on the scholarly contribution of each source to Occitan literature, with remarks on striking or controversial content, and numerous cross-references that identify complementary studies and differing opinions. Taylor's painstaking attention to detail and broad knowledge of the field ensure that this guide will become the essential source for Occitan literary studies worldwide.


A Most Holy War

A Most Holy War

Author: Mark Gregory Pegg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-10-30

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0195393104

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Historian Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of a horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women bring the story vividly to life.


Lark in the Morning

Lark in the Morning

Author: Robert Kehew

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005-09-15

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 0226429334

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Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of Pound & Snodgrass, to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse & the astonishing variety of troubadour voices.