The provencal sirventes and petition poems

The Provençal sirventes and its French counterpart, the serventois, are among the least understood and studied of the major lyrical genres of Medieval poetry. Literary critics of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have concentrated either on the conundrum of the origins of the troubadours' poetry or the philosophical and social aspects of fin' amours, courtly love. As a result of this critical emphasis, the sirventes has long eluded precise definition. In fact, the most frequent definition of it is that the sirventes is lyrical poetry (1.e., it is sung) which deals with any subject except love.

The purpose of this study, therefore, is to trace the development of the sirventes through Provençal and French poetry. The study of primary sources in medieval Provençal, Catalan, and French establish three categories of the genre: the moral, political, and personal. It soon becomes apparent that the last category is the least thoroughly treated by the treatises dealing with the troubadours' poetry.

This personal sirventes is so ill-defined that one category of it has never, as far as I can determine, been singled out for attention: the petition poem in which the troubadour or trouvère appeals to his patron for reward or compensation for services rendered. By dis- cussing the social role of the patron and the troubadour in Provençal society I have established that the entertainer was a professional who used the petition sirventes to claim a justified wage. In an analysis of several of these songs I referred to those themes which make up the characteristic content of the petition sirventes. This thematic study will lead to a definition of the sub-genre.

The final phase of this thesis examines a representative selection of petition poems in German, Latin, and Arabic in order to determine if the Provençal genre is representative of a universal poetic genre.