Roman Influences on the Troubadours

Wandering around Narbonne revealed tons of Roman history that I hadn't expected to see that far in the South of France. With my project, I looked into those Roman vestiges further, and searched for where bits and pieces of Roman ideas and phrases showed through in troubadour works. I specifically looked at Ovid and at Roman Religious Texts found in St. Martial's abbey, which we can be fairly certain that the troubadours were exposed to. Ovid's work shows through in the forms of the troubadour poetry, the roles and the characters used, and the definition of love used in the poetry. The pastoral springtime opening, with the author wandering around in some natural idyllic setting and then coming upon a beautiful woman and writing a song inspired by her is a trope started by Ovid and picked up by the troubadours. Similarly, the roles of the fickle and powerful lady, the tough but cuckolded husband, and the subservient lover who is actually doing this to bolster his own reputation are tropes clearly seen in Ovid. The definition of love arises from these roles. Ovid started the celebration of adulterous love, and the idea of the husband profiting from his wife's adulterous behavior. Indeed, there is a Guillaume IX poem that almost directly copies these sentiments from a passage in the Ars Amatoria. Religious poetry also shows through in the troubadour poetry. There are a number of Marian poems in Roman times that paint Mary as the ultimate intercessor and pray to her for mercy. The troubadours pick this up and use it in their poetry as well. It is especially evident in Pierre Cardenal's poetry. It could even be argued that the troubadours carry this trope to the next level by taking veneration of a divine figure, and translating it to veneration of the earthly woman in their poetry, but with the same tropes and ideas and phrases. Finally, structurally, troubadours clearly borrow from Roman thought. The poems composed in the troubadour era follow the same ideal of having a form to each strophe, and a defined number of syllables in each line. The troubadours made this a little more complex, but they did build upon a Roman ideal. Even from these limited examples, the troubadours clearly borrowed and built upon Roman ideals. They were a way that the classics continued to live, and would later really blossom out during the Renaissance.