SOURCE: Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. Introduction to Songs of the Women Troubadours, edited and translated by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Laurie Shepard, and Sarah White, pp. xi-xlvii. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

In the following essay, Bruckner discusses how the trobairitz altered the prevailing poetic system that was largely shaped by males.

This collection assembles twenty named women poets and a selection of anonymous domnas, names and voices derived from poems, rubrics, vidas (biographies) and razos (commentaries) recorded in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If they are only twenty or so among more than four hundred named troubadours of Southern France, these women poets, active from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, nevertheless represent an exceptional and exceptionally large group of literary women within medieval tradition. As such, they deserve the attention of a modern public searching for a fuller understanding of the roles men and women have played...