Marcoat

Marcoat was a minor Gascon troubadour and joglar who flourished in the mid twelfth century. He is often cited in connexion with Eleanor of Aquitaine and is placed in a hypothetical "school" of poetry which includes Bernart de Ventadorn, Marcabru, Cercamon, Jaufre Rudel, Peire Rogier, and Peire de Valeria among others.^[1] Of all his works, only two sirventes survive: Mentre m'obri eis huisel and Una re.us dirai, en Serra.^[2]

Marcoat was an innovator building off the work of the contemporary Gascon Marcabru,^[3] whose death he recalls in one of his works c. 1150.^[4] Nonetheless his works are very simple, the stanzas being comppsed of three heptasyllables rhyming in the form AAB.^[2] It was he who first used the term sirventes to describe his poems;^[2] the word appears in both of his surviving works, twice in one:

Mentre m'obri eis huisel,

un sirventes escubel

en giteira inz s'arena

. . .

Mon serventes no val plus,

que faitz es de bos moz clus

apren lo, Domeing Sarena.^[5]

The meaning of these verses is obscure, as he was an early practitioner of the trobar clus style.^[3][6] According to himself, he wrote vers contradizentz (contradictory verses).^[6] He was a model for the later troubadour Raimbaut d'Aurenga.^[3]

Sources

• Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. ISBN 0 22605 982 0.
• Chambers, Frank M. An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification. Diane Publishing, 1985. ISBN 0 87169 167 1.
• Dejeanne, Jean-Marie-Lucien. "Marcoat." Annales du Midi, xv (1903).
• Harvey, Ruth. "Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Troubadours." The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, edd. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005. ISBN 1 84383 114 7.
• Léglu, Catherine. "Moral and satirical poetry." The Troubadours: An Introduction. edd. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 52157 473 0.
• Pfeffer, Wendy. Review of Suzanne Thiolier-Méjean, La Poétique des Troubadours: Trois Études sur le Sirventes, in Speculum, 72:1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 230–231.
• Thiolier-Méjean, Suzanne. La poétique des troubadours: Trois études sur le sirventes. Paris: Presse de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1994.

Notes

1. ^ Harvey, 102.
2. ^ ^{a b c} Chambers, 90.
3. ^ ^{a b c} Thiolier-Méjean, 114–123.
4. ^ Léglu, 48.
5. ^ Chambers, 91, from the poem Mentre m'obri eis huisel.
6. ^ ^{a b} Bloch, 114.