Vidas and razos as commentary for the canso of the troubadours

Abstract

The article analyzes the Old Provençal texts of the 13^th century known as vidas and razos. These short texts have been preserved in manuscripts alongside the lyrics of troubadours’ songs and represent a kind of commentary — a presentation of the text. They are quite diverse, but all of them contain both a story about the poet’s biography and an explanation of certain passages in his text. It is believed that razos and vidas were composed by jongleurs and minstrels as introductions or explanations of the text performed by singers. The lyrics of the songs and the narratives of the vidas/razos were composed by different authors, and there could be a gap of several decades between them. A vida/razo can be considered as a commentary that does not clarify the old texts but rather creates new meanings. These new meanings are related to the changes that occurred in the attitude towards courtly poetry and the author-work relationship in the 13^th century. These changes are analyzed in Michel Zink’s monograph “On Subjectivity in Literature: Around the Age of Saint Louis,” to which the author refers. The article analyzes the razo to a canso by Bernard de Ventadorn and the vida of Jaufre Rudel. These texts are presented in the article as a special case of patterns characteristic of 13^th-century literature. The analysis proposed by the author opens up a new approach to the study of the vidas and razos in their correlation with the corresponding cansos of 12^th-century troubadours.