Marcabru: A Critical Edition

One of the earliest troubadours, Marcabru was a remarkable artist and entertainer, and a figure of crucial importance to the development of the European courtly lyric. His blistering attacks on contemporary court society reveal an intellectual insider’s view of the clash between clerical morality and the emerging secular ethics of love and courtesy. His fervent, often acerbic engagement with contemporary events also provides a unique southern perspective on political upheavals and crusading movements in twelfth-century Occitania and northern Spain. This new critical edition, the first for nearly 100 years, makes his complete corpus accessible to a wide readership, supplying translations, full critical apparatus, and copious textual notes, with a substantial glossary of Marcabru’s extraordinarily inventive vocabulary. The introduction supplies historical information, discussion of the poet’s language, and an analysis of the manuscript transmission. It also raises fresh issues of troubadour versification techniques in this formative period, and engages in a new way with the current debate about editorial methodology and medieval textual criticism. (Leaflet blurb - see AN)