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Updated: June 3, 2025
This and other similar narratives furnished materials for the romances, which appeared at the conclusion of the Crusades, when a knowledge of the East had enriched the French imagination with all the treasures of the Arabian. The trouveres were not only the inventors of the romances of chivalry, but they originated the allegories, and the dramatic compositions of southern Europe.
His originals were not the chivalrous romances, but the comic Fabliaux, and the allegorical poetry cultivated by the Trouveres and Troubadours.
Similar letters were sent to Alexander III, to Louis VII of France, and to the King of Portugal, which are alluded to in chronicles and romances, and which were indeed turned into rhyme, and sung all over Europe by minstrels and trouveres.
In general, the Trouvères devoted themselves to fiction and story, while their southern brethren sang of love. The novel, used largely in the south, was a short poem containing some brilliant anecdote of gallantry, couched in neat phrase. The romance, or long narrative, was by reason of its size the most permanent of all the poetry of this age.
We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly being told by trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory, and called by him the "Morte d'Arthur" of the ladies and knights of Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were bastards and fathers of bastards; of the intrigues of Tristram of Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which Francesca and Paolo read together.
Where does chivalry at last become something more than a mere procession of plumes and armor, to be lamented by Burke, except in some of the less ambitious verses of the Trouvères, where we hear the canakin clink too emphatically, perhaps, but which at least paint living men and possible manners? Tennyson's knights are cloudy, gigantic, of no age or country, like the heroes of Ossian.
Provence, where it originated, early became an independent kingdom, while in the north the literature of the Trouveres became the foundation of the national literature of France.
Other poets seizing on the old romance of the Trouveres, added to them an element of mockery, in place of the old religious belief. This new spirit was adopted by Ariosto. From the East he borrowed the magic and sorcery interwoven in the adventures of his knights and ladies, giants and magicians.
And in a large proportion of cases the poems of trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers are the expression of fortunate love, the fond recollection or eager expectation of meetings with the beloved. All this can evidently not be connected with the wooing, however stealthy, however Romeo-and-Juliet-like of a bride; still less can it be explained in reference to love within wedlock.
At the end of the sixteenth century, these new pursuits acquired a more immediate influence over the literature of France, and wrought a change in its spirit and rules, without, however, altering the national character and taste which had been manifested in the earliest productions of the trouveres. It was disdained by the more serious writers, who continued to employ the Latin.
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