Ebook: A Stylistic Analysis of the Poetry of Giraut de Bornelh

Giraut de Bornelh, a Provencal troubadour who composed during the late twelfth century, was an acknowledged practitioner of trobar clus and trobar leu. These two poetic modes have been the subject of much controversy among Giraut's contemporaries and modern commentators alike. In a tenso in which Giraut debates the merits of trobar clus and trobar leu, the former is associated with poetry that is difficult to understand, the latter, with works that are easy. While Old Provencal treatises on poetry offer no definition of trobar clus and trobar leu, numerous modern commentators have attempted to come up with a definition after interpreting statements on the two modes found in certain songs. Yet not one tests his definition by a scientific study of the individual poems. Given the apparent importance of trobar clus and trobar leu for the appreciation of Old Provencal poetic style and the inadequate treatment they have received, the aim of the thesis is to define in as objective a way as possible some of the characteristics of these two modes in the work of Giraut de Bornelh.

At the outset, a test group of six songs was selected from the whole corpus of his works based on authorial statements of intention: Songs 3, 26 and 27, representing trobar clus, and Songs 4, 28 and 40, representing trobar leu. In the test group, a quantitative analysis was carried out which focused on three elements: (1) syntax and grammar, (2) difficult vocabulary, (3) tropes.

It was discovered that the two groups of songs were essentially undistinguishable from the point of view of syntactic and grammatical forms used. However, the songs in the clus mode appeared to have a higher concentration of difficult vocabulary and tropes, especially metaphors.

The concentration of tropes and difficult vocabulary was then studied intensively in Giraut's 70-odd other poems, to determine which were in the clus and leu modes. It was discovered that in only Songs 23 and 53 was the proportion of these elements as high as in the sample clus poems. A few of Giraut's works have some characteristics of both the clus and leu modes (Songs 11, 30, 44 and 48). Giraut's other songs appear to be in the leu mode.