William D. Paden’s recent publication of A Troubadour Reader is a welcome supplement to his earlier An Introduction to Old Occitan (1998), which has become the standard English-language textbook for learning the language of the medieval troubadours. The Introduction provided a comprehensive exposition of Occitan morphology and phonology across more than thirty chapters, along with detailed grammatical tables and a useful Occitan-English glossary. Each chapter also included an exemplary reading from the troubadour corpus, accompanied by extensive gloss and commentary. The book therefore functioned both as a language manual and a teaching anthology; however, because the readings are tied to the grammatical lessons treated in each chapter, they are meant to be read in sequence and can prove awkward to excerpt for other uses (for example, in a survey course). The newly published Reader resolves this issue by offering a new selection of thirty glossed poems in a format that is designed to make the Occitan text accessible to a wide audience.
The book opens with a concise preface that provides historical context on the troubadour tradition and an overview of the basic elements of Occitan grammar, which refers the reader back to the materials in the Introduction for further explanation. What follows is a generous selection of lyric texts, organized chronologically, which together represent a more expansive conception of the Occitan language and its corpus than is found in earlier such anthologies. Paden’s editorial choices reflect recent developments in the field, notably the shift away from the poets and genres of the twelfth-century “classical period” and the increasing critical interest in Occitan poetry produced outside of what is now Southwestern France. The first three texts in the Reader are among the earliest-surviving examples of verse in a language recognizable as Occitan: “Tomida femina,” (no. 1), a ninth-century birthing charm found in the margins of a Latin legal treatise, and two eleventh-century works, “Las, qui non sun sparvir, astur” (no. 2), a lyric fragment preserved in a manuscript of German origin, and “O Maria, Deu maire” (no. 3), a hymn to the Virgin Mary compiled in an important collection of Latin liturgical versus from Saint Martial de Limoges. By opening his anthology with “pre-troubadour” poems, Paden highlights the diverse cultural influences, as well as metrical and linguistic forms, which contributed to shaping the more familiar themes and genres of the twelfth century. The last three texts in the Reader likewise expand the scope of the troubadour canon by featuring works representative of “post-classical” Occitan literary culture, highlighting its dissemination into Italy and Spain. These are a thirteenth-century alba or “dawn-song” (no. 27, “Qu’on lo rossinhols s’escria”), the Occitan speech attributed to Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio 26 of Dante’s Comedia (no. 28), “Tam m’abelis vostre cortes deman,” and a descort by the fifteenth-century “Queen of Mallorca” (no. 30, “Ez yeu am tal qu’es bo e belh”).
Between these chronological bookends appears a generous sampling of lyrics by major male and female troubadours, including Guilhem IX, Jaufre Rudel, Bernart de Ventadorn, Comtessa de Dia, and Arnaut Daniel. Each entry is prefaced with historical and bibliographical information and concludes with commentary on the poem’s metrical form and rhyme scheme. The most appealing feature of the Reader is the layout of the page, which is designed for maximum convenience, consisting of two columns, one with Occitan text on the left and another on the right with English gloss of selected words and phrases. Grammatical commentary appears in footnote format after each stanza. An abundance of helpful information is therefore immediately available to the reader, facilitating translation by eliminating the need to consult grammatical tables or glossaries elsewhere in the book. This interpretive scaffolding should make it possible for anyone with a limited knowledge of Occitan—or even a modern Romance language—to grasp the sense and structure of the medieval text.
The critical apparatus functions both as an aid to translation and as a point of entry into the broader historical context and scholarly debates related to each poem. These issues are made more evident by Paden’s decision to reproduce manuscript readings with only minimal editorial intervention, which exposes the reader to a range of possible orthographies, dialectal inflections, and “non-normative” grammatical features, all of which are extensively glossed in the notes. When Paden does alter the base text, for example, by adding line breaks, these changes tend to highlight fundamental differences between manuscript and print, again drawing the critical focus back to the medieval text, and hopefully encouraging readers to consult a digital version of the source online. A complete list of chansonniers with current links to online sources is also helpfully provided.
A Troubadour Reader is thoughtfully designed, well executed, and delivers on Paden’s stated goal to “engage readers directly with the Occitan text” (xi). For these reasons it will appeal to anyone interested in deepening their knowledge of the Occitan language and poetic tradition, but should prove especially useful to teachers. Since courses devoted entirely to Occitan are exceedingly rare these days, even at the graduate level, few instructors will have the time or opportunity to teach the language of the troubadours through a dedicated course of study such as the one laid out in the Introduction. The Reader, therefore, provides a flexible alternative, suited to diverse uses and audiences, which offers multiple points of entry into the Occitan language and the troubadour tradition.