Courtly Love in Meg Bogin’s "The Women Troubadours"

Maria de Ventadorn writes in a style common to the trobairitz of her time in the south of France. Meg Bogin’s collection The Women Troubadours will be used to outline general aspects of courtly love. This type of lyric is called a tenson, a common form of performed collaborative song with alternating stanzas (16). In the lyric, courtly love is presented as a game and Lady Maria’s interest is to win. This can be observed in the treatment of her counterpart and her ideas about courtship.

The tone of the poem is conversational and pert written in a plain, informal style. Neither voice uses a lot of poetic imagery in any of the verses and the language is considerably colloquial not employing metaphor and ambiguity in terms of the meaning. A question is posed as the introduction and the address is clear; Lady Maria implores Gui D’ussel to engage with her in this dialogue and confronts him with questions regarding the dynamic of lovers. The taunting tone of the dialogue is suggestive of a courting between the two, however, it is not explicit about the nature of the relationship as they do not, on any occasion specify the lady and man in question. The ambiguity that does exist revolves around the authors’ position in the text and whether or not they are debating about courtly love in particular or whether the generality of the “lady” and “man” in question are their potential selves.

Even though the speakers are identified as the authors, they can more accurately be described as characters based on themselves. We know that this type of lyric was most likely performed in front of an audience probably set to music. The public’s relationship to such work can be likened with dramatic performance of today such as a musical or a...

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... are the “weaker, purer, more virtuous sex” (10), however, in this poem, Lady Maria is the more aggressive, imploring, suggestive and outspoken one. Humility is not her goal here: there is a play on the word “rule” (16) where in Lady Maria is pointing out the hypocrisy in the rules in order to establish a relationship in which she is the one who rules.

This alternation of Lady Maria’s impudence and Gui d’Ussel’s sensibility make for an amusing performance no matter whose side the audience is on. The song functions as entertainment rather than a brooding expression of love and concern and subverts stereotypical ideas about a woman’s voice being seeded in humility. Lady Maria wants it both ways and is entitled to her own ideas about courtship since she is in a position of expressing herself through writing while also accepting the role of a subject of adoration.