ABSTRACT
This collection assembles twenty named women poets and a selection of anonymous domnas, names and voices derived from poems, rubrics, vidas (biographies) and razos (commentaries) recorded in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If they are only twenty or so among more than four hundred named troubadours of Southern France, these women poets, active from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, nevertheless represent an exceptional and exceptionally large group of literary women within medieval tradition. As such, they deserve the attention of a modern public searching for a fuller understanding of the roles men and women have played in the formation of western culture. A modern reader, denied immediate access to the world of the Occitan courts and their live performances of music and song, necessarily meets troubadours, male and female, in the textual world of medieval chansonniers in which their songs were written down in anthology form. Among the women troubadours named in the manuscripts-all noblewomen as far as their social status can be determined-only Gaudairenca, the wife of Raimon de Miraval, has left no trace in this collection, since her "coblas e dansas" have not survived (Boutière 380). Among the anonymous domnas whose status as women poets remains problematic, our selection gives a wide sample of the different voices attributed to female speakers within the context of troubadour lyric. In order to understand and appreciate the accomplishments of these "trobairitz" (the feminine form of "trobador," according to the thirteenth-century romance Flamenca), we need to situate them and their poems in a variety of contexts, literary and historical, cultural and linguistic.
