The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, southern France witnessed first a burgeoning, then a decline in the poetry of women troubadours—trobairitz. These women stood both within and outside the troubadour tradition, so their work is interesting for social and literary-historical reasons as well as for its aesthetic merit. Many of their twenty-eight surviving poems are love songs in which the trobairitz expresses her desire with a freshness that places her in startling contrast with the...