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The Trobairitz
The trobairitz
The troubadour revolution that burst onto the medieval European cultural scene is even more extraordinary thanks to the appearance of a minority —but very significant— group: women troubadours or trobairitz.
The term trobairitz, as Angelica Rieger (2003: 42) notes 'is not used by the women troubadours themselves, and we don’t find it either in their own texts (...) or in works by male troubadours. (...) However, trobairitz is an authentic term: it comes from the only surviving medieval Occitan novel in verse, Flamenca'.
Despite the paucity of data and extant works, this group of women made a considerable impact because they were 'among the first women in Western Europe to embrace the world of vernacular literary discourse, of language not limited to the ephemeral, precarious enunciations that constitute the exchanges of daily life, but of a language meant to be heard and preserved beyond the circumscribed sphere of the domestic' (Sankovit