MARCABRU SOCIAL WORLD

The Provençal poet Marcabru (1115-1150) is a member of the second generation of troubadours, after Guillaume d'Aquitaine. As a satirist, he relies heavily on references to specific persons and places, and it is possible to reconstruct a social world from his writings, a type of analysis often applied to medieval works like the Roman de la Rose or the Grant Testament of Villon. A careful reading of his forty surviving texts leads to the conclusion that his world was the small agrarian community, which may suggest that it is time to revise our assumptions about the "courtly" setting of the Provençal lyric. © 1990.