When I was in college, I took a course on King Arthur in Legend and Literature (or something along those lines). We read Mallory and Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes and I wrote a paper on something I can’t even remember at this point, and then disappeared down a rabbit hole of mediaeval Provençal literature, ending up with Meg Bogin’s The Women Troubadours.

For, as I learned in this class, Arthur started as a footnote in history, became someone to look back on, but did not achieve full legend until the French got their hands on him and began embroidering. It was the troubadours who added Lancelot and the quest for the holy grail, and Lancelot’s obsession with Guinevere. And it all came from the culture they were developing down there in Provence.

The middle ages wasn’t a great time to be a woman. If your family had any property at all, you were a pawn to be married off in alliance, and were expected to arrive a virgin, remain faithful, and produce heirs (sons) for your husband. If you were unable to do so, your marriage was ended and you were returned home in disgrace, where you were promptly married off again or sent to a convent. If you were a good wife, faithful and pregnant, your husband might take off on a crusade, leaving you at home, where you were at the mercy of other men.

In the southern parts of what is now France, where the culture was closer to that of their romantic neighbors of (what would eventually become) Spain and Italy¹, court poets, or troubadours, began to sing of courtly love, romantic love, putting women firmly on a pedestal, and proclaiming that their (the troubadour’s) devotion to the women that sung of, made them better men. These were, as you might imagine, affairs of the heart and not the body, for a woman who stooped from her pedestal lost her reputation and the trust of her lord. As Guinevere found, to her shame.²

For many of us, troubadours bring up the thought of wandering young men in striped tights, fancy doublets, and silly hats, strumming lutes and singing with wide eyes up at a window. But many of them were appointed to courts, serving a lord and lady. And while they might sing of love for the lady, it is an idealized love, one that they would not profane through physical touch.

Lesser known is the number of female troubadours – trobairitz – who were working at the same time. Their songs were different, more conversational, less poetic, and they sang of love grounded in reality, not on a pedestal. They did not worship the men they sang of or seek to be worshipped. So different are their poems that one begins to question the intent of the troubadour’s poems – were they hypocritical about love, creating an idealized vision of woman who could never be realized by actual women, who unlike the Virgin Mary, were not conceived of immaculately and conceived immaculately, and so lived in sin?

This book explores the theme of courtly love, as well as the history leading up to the troubadours and women’s role in their culture; and the poems themselves, how they differ from poems written by men, and what little is known of the women who wrote them.

For me, it inspired a play about a young woman, newly married, whose older husband has gone off to the crusades, leaving her in charge of his castle, overseen by his widowed mother and his priest. She develops a crush on a handsome young troubadour, more her age, a younger son of a neighbor. He writes poetry about his devotion to her but leaves her in confusion about his true feelings, avoiding committing himself, while evading a firm declination – thus he holds her in his power. When his father calls him away, she begins writing her own poetry, the performance of which causes her mother and law and priest to scold her. Finally her husband returns, battle-scarred and burn out from war, proclaiming his own love for her. The play ends with her setting her lute aside to care for him.

Friend, if you had shown consideration
meekness, candor, and humanity,
I’d have loved you without hesitation;
but you were mean and sly and villainous.
Still I make this song to sing your praises
wide, for I can’t bear to let your name
go on, unsung and unrenowned,
no matter how much worse you treat me now.

• Castelloza, b. 1200. Translated by Frederick Goldin.

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1. As opposed to Northern areas which were closer in culture to England and what would eventually become Germany. ↩︎
2. Or was that all just gossip, designed to cause dissent? She, after all, never bore children. And, while we might believe that Arthur was unable to give her any – for the grail Arthur sends all his knights on a quest for is found in the care of the Fisher King, who suffers from impotence – do we also believe that Lancelot suffers from the same problem? ↩︎