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The lyric poetry of the "trouvères" in Northern France was deeply influenced both in form and spirit by troubadour poetry, and traces of this influence are perceptible even in early middle-English lyrics.
The spirit of chivalry which burst forth in the romances of the trouveres, the heroism of honor and love, the devotion of the powerful to the weak, the supernatural fictions, so novel and so dissimilar to everything in antiquity or in later times, the force and brilliancy of imagination which they display, have been variously attributed to the Arabians and the Germans, but they were undoubtedly the invention of the Normans.
It is possible that this Guinemer was borrowed by our trouveres from some ancient Walloon tradition; for his name, which in Latin is Winemarus, appears to have occurred chiefly in those countries forming part, from the ninth to the twelfth century, of the County of Flanders.
Here, too, the women had a chance to show their own skill; for, if there were no woman Trouvères, there were plenty who were well able to hold their own in the shorter forms of the Troubadours. That kings and princes did not disdain to become Troubadours is proved by the example of Richard of England and the Dauphin of Auvergne.
The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And their song comes from the castle.
First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, although known to us only in poems no older than those of the trouvères and minnesingers who sang of Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more ancient, and on account of its antiquity and its consequent disconnection with mediæval religious and political interests, was thrown aside even by the nations to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians who took to writing sagas about the wars of Charlemagne against Saracens, and by the Germans who preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton, Launcelots and Tristrams.
The poets and story writers called themselves Trouveres, and they invented the fabliaux, the dramatic mysteries and romances of ancient chivalry. Born of this legend were some of the best known of modern romances. The word romance, which in the early history of France was used to distinguish the common dialect from the Latin, was later applied to all imaginative and inventive tales.
The first period extends from 1000 to 1500, and includes the literature of the Troubadours, the Trouveres, and of the fifteenth century. The second period extends from 1500 to 1700, and includes the revival of the study of classical literature, or the Renaissance, and the golden age of French literature under Louis XIV.
Such ventures as these where an aspirant for fame would wait for days at a cross-road, a ford, or a bridge, until some worthy antagonist should ride that way, were very common in the old days of adventurous knight erranty, and were still familiar to the minds of all men because the stories of the romancers and the songs of the trouveres were full of such incidents.
The Middle Ages, so full of fashions in literary matters, possessed no classics; the minnesingers knew nothing of the stern old Teutonic war songs; the meistersängers had forgotten the minnesingers; the trouvères and troubadours knew nothing of "The Chanson de Roland," and Villon knew nothing of them; only in Italy, where the Middle Ages came to an end and the Renaissance began with the Lombard league, was there established a tradition of excellence, with men like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, handed down from generation to generation; even as, while in the north there came about the strange modification which substituted the French of Rabelais for the French of Chrestien de Troyes, the German of Luther for the German of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Italian language, from Ciullo d'Alcamo almost to Boiardo and Lorenzo dei Medici, remained virtually identical.
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