Seeing Women Troubadours without the “-itz” and “-isms”

Although scholars of Old Occitan have long been aware that there were women composing troubadour poetry in southern France (Occitania) from the thirteenth century onward,1 the idea of the woman troubadour still troubles them. It is now generally accepted that courtly reverence for the lady did not entail reverence for the female, and that courtly structures are as much about homosocial bonds as they appear to be about heterosexual love. Leaving aside the question of the socioeconomic circumstances that may have given Occitan women the freedom to be poets,2 how, many scholars have asked themselves, could they compose within such a seemingly masculinist tradition? Critical opinion is thus frequently divided into two camps: those who believe the identity of these women poets to be a fiction created by male troubadours, and those who imagine them as the Virginia Woofs of their day, creating embryonic feminist poetic practices of their own. In either case there is a problem in seeing the women troubadours as troubadours. My concern in this essay is the latter, and especially latter-day, tendency to over-feminize the women troubadours and to read their poetry as expressive of a steadfast female identity. Readings of this sort, which claim to be gender-conscious, turn gender into a stricture, a normalizing filter through which a group of “troublesome” texts can be reclassified.