This chapter will examine the absorption of lyric motifs into Old French narrative poetry. Northern French and Anglo-Norman poets could certainly have encountered troubadour lyric at the courts where vernacular literature flourished, such as the Plantagenet court in England or that of Marie, Countess of Champagne. Two thirteenth-century manuscripts of Northern French lyric contain substantial groupings of troubadour verse, and two of the earliest French romances with lyric insertions, Jean Renart's Roman de la rose (Guillaume de Dole) and Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la violette, include citations of troubadour songs. But while some narrative poets would have had direct knowledge of troubadour verse, others would have known only its reception and recasting by Northern French lyric poets, or trouvères. The corpus of trouvère lyric, heavily influenced by that of the troubadours, established a first-person discourse of desire in the Northern French vernacular and articulated a courtly ideology of love. The following discussion will examine the reception of the troubadour corpus as a genre, whether direct or mediated by the trouvères. Without attempting to identify specific sources and lines of dissemination, I will focus on ways in which constructions of courtliness, subjectivity and affective experience explored by the troubadours are reworked by Northern French narrative poets.

The transposition of lyric into narrative requires certain changes: the advent of a narrator who speaks from a vantage point outside the fictional frame, the creation of a linear progression governed at least minimally by a logic of space, time and causality.