In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and continuing into the fourteenth, the region that we know as the South of France was home to the troubadours, poets whose lyrics were heard from the Pyrenees to the Alps. These poets did not speak French but Occitan, the vernacular language of the region. The word “troubadour” represents Occitan trobador, from the verb trobar, meaning “to find,” “to invent,” or “to compose”; hence, a troubadour is “one who finds, invents, or composes.” Women troubadours are called by the infrequent feminine form of the word, trobairitz. Although we know about twenty trobairitz by name, relatively few of their works survive. We have about fifty poems that we attribute to trobairitz, including several anonymous poems that appear to have been written by women. This number compares with about 2,500 poems composed by 360 men and women combined.

Some troubadours kept a number of joglars in their service. The word joglar corresponds to jongleur in French and English, “an itinerant minstrel, who sang and composed ballads, told stories and otherwise entertained people” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.). Troubadours who employed joglars, such as Bertran de Born, would send one of them off to perform a new composition before the addressee. The distinction between troubadour and joglar was not hard and fast: both composed and both performed, but the troubadour tended to be primarily the composer, and the joglar the performer.

In the beginning, troubadour poems were transmitted as songs from one musical performance to the next. The poems gained increasing prestige over time, and by the mid-thirteenth century, if not earlier, scribes began to write them down. In the manuscripts that have survived, the poems present themselves to us directly, enveloped in an aura of prestige that implies high esteem for their art. The original environment of the poems, however—their social, political, literary, and musical context—is more difficult to grasp. These poets and singers lived in a world very different from our own.

Rather than living in modern nation-states with sharply defined borders, the troubadours inhabited spheres of influence that constantly shifted and changed. Though most of them lived in the land we call France today, they did not consider themselves French.