5 - Raimbaut d'Aurenga

Summary

Raimbaut d' Aurenga's poetry is the largest corpus by an amateur poet to have survived from the early years of the troubadour tradition. Unlike troubadours such as Marcabru or Bernart de Ventadorn, he did not have to develop a style which was recognizably his own, for which audiences might turn to him, and him alone. He composed now in one style, now in another; he adopts one persona, then another. He mocks labels and composes his poetry however and whenever it pleases him. His work, unlike that of Marcabru or Bernart de Ventadorn, resists systematization, whether critics are attempting to study his style, the content of his poems, or the man behind the facade. Virtually the only unifying factor that runs through the corpus is an appealing lack of respect for convention, which often manifests itself through a relentless sense of humour.

Medieval rhetorical manuals are consistent in linking ironia with mockery and criticism. The kind of biting irony they prescribe is perhaps best typified by Marcabru's virulent moralizing. It is hardly surprising that a poet as capricious as Raimbaut should have little or no use for such devices. Confident, even complacent, in his position as a young noble, Raimbaut has no need to criticize the social order or to lament his position in it; his tongue is usually firmly in his cheek. He does not use rhetorical irony as Marcabru does, and yet his poems are perhaps more strikingly ironic than those of any other troubadour.