While few medieval cultural phenomena have been discussed more assiduously and persistently than that of fin'amor, which made its appearance in the poetry of the troubadours, the contributions of the women troubadours, or trobairitz, were long neglected. Although the poetry of the trobairitz has been available in print, at least in part, since the late nineteenth century, there were few critical studies until a renewed interest was spurred by a growing concern with all aspects of female culture in the Middle Ages. In 1976 Meg Bogin published her edition of trobairitz poems, and since then there have been several new editions, as well as a substantial number of critical appraisals and analyses of what constitutes a small but provocative body of poems.

In troubadour poetry woman, as domna, is omni-present, but the function she fulfils is a passive and silent one, since she figures mainly as the necessary object of the poet–lover's desire. Fin'amor, to use Julia Kristeva's words, ‘holds only nothingness in store for the other, particularly the other sex … The one who constitutes himself through it creates himself in and for himself.’ The domna is relegated to being the poet's ‘mirror’, and in fact is called exactly that in a number of poems. The ‘nothingness’, the empty space, the ‘mirror’ of woman, of the mute ‘other’ sex, is filled by the troubadour with the discourse, the definition and description, of himself.