SOURCE: Léglu, Catherine. “Defamation in the Troubadour Sirventes: Legislation and Lyric Poetry.” Medium Aevum 66, no. 1 (1997): 28-41.

In the following essay, Léglu examines the political implications of certain slanderous troubadour songs.

One of the features of satirical writing is that it transgresses textual boundaries in order to address issues and concerns understood by performer and audience to be extra-textual. Despite an awareness of the relations between troubadour sirventes and contemporary political and personal disputes, the possibility that these songs might have functioned as lampoons, and been received as slander, has not been fully addressed.¹

The twelfth-century troubadour Marcabru is described in one of the fourteenth-century vidas composed about him as a slanderer: ‘e dis mal de las femnas e d'amor’ (‘and he slandered women and love’).² Maldir,³ from the Latin male dicere, also maledictum or maledictio, means (in classical usage) slander, wicked gossip, criticism or insult.⁴ This...