6 - Giraut de Borneil

Summary

Giraut de Borneil's surviving corpus is remarkable both for its diversity and for its size. The seventy-five poems which can be attributed to him with certainty include vers, cansos, sirventes, planhs, tensos, pastorelas, an alba, a sirventes joglaresc, a riddle poem and a group of poems Kolsen called Sirventes-Kanzonen because of the way they mix together moral themes with love poetry. His is the largest corpus to have survived from the early years of the troubadour tradition and his popularity among the compilers of the chansonniers is well attested and unrivalled. Indeed, of the early troubadours Giraut is the most popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Of course popularity and good poetry do not always go hand in hand. Dante praised Giraut as a poeta rectitudinis, but ultimately decided that he was overrated and that Arnaut Daniel was the better poet; modern scholars have tended to agree with Dante. Giraut's lack of spontaneity and his scholarly approach to light-hearted subjects can often lead to flat and pedestrian poetry: he is thought of as a didactic poet, given to long digressions on moral themes and steeped in medieval rhetorical theory.

It is not my intention to argue that Giraut de Borneil was a poet of the calibre of Marcabru, Bernart de Ventadorn or Arnaut Daniel. However, I do believe that Giraut has not entirely merited his reputation as a boring poet. By examining Giraut's use of irony, I hope to show that his sense of humour has perhaps been underestimated and that he can even be quite lively.