William D. Paden – författare

Occitan lyric poetry for language learnersA Troubadour Reader, a supplement to William D. Paden's Introduction to Old Occitan, provides a diverse selection of thirty medieval lyric poems in Occitan for language learners. Featuring poems by women, poems composed especially early or especially late in the language's literary use, and poems that feature Occitan in contact with other languages, the book highlights the range and wealth of medieval Occitan lyric poetry. Each poem is presented with a brief introduction, glosses on the text, and notes after each stanza. The volume also includes a section on basic Occitan grammar, a list of manuscripts, bibliographical references, and an index.

An Introduction to Old Occitan is the only textbook in print for learning the language used by the troubadours in southern France during the Middle Ages. Each of the thirty-two chapters discusses a subject in the study of the language (e.g., stressed vowels, subjunctive mood) and includes an exercise based on a reading of an Occitan text that has been edited afresh for this volume. An essential glossary analyzes every occurrence of every word in the readings and gives cognates in other Romance languages as well as the source of each word in Latin or other languages. The book also contains a list of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes and a dictionary of proper names. An accompanying compact disc includes discussion of the pronunciation of the language, with illustrations from the texts in the book, and musical performances by Elizabeth Aubrey, of the University of Iowa.

Medieval genres of lyric poetry have long been accepted as self-evident categories that define the literature. Medieval Lyric reveals the importance of investigating the historicity of genres themselves as a means of coming to grips with the evolution of the poems they were meant to characterize and the cultures they attempted to serve.  An essential volume for medievalists and scholars of comparative literature, Medieval Lyric opens up a reconsideration of genre in medieval European lyric. Departing from a perspective that asks how medieval genres correspond with twentieth-century ideas of structure or with the evolution of poetry, this valuable collection argues that the development of genres should be considered as a historical phenomenon, embedded in a given culture and responsive to social and literary change.  An array of widely respected scholars draw from French, Italian, German, Latin, Catalan, Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Arabic, and Hebrew literature to address questions about what genre could have meant to medieval poets and poet-musicians and what distortions result when modern ideas of genre are applied to medieval lyric. Essays explore the relations of medieval lyric genres, such as love songs and satires, to their historical contexts and consider genres in relation to rhetoric and music. Contributors also challenge the concept of genre itself, clarifying what we do when we read in genres and demonstrating the hazards of applying concepts of genre to an age that did not think in those terms.

Guillelmus de Aragonia was known as a philosopher for his commentary on Boethius and his works on physiognomy, oneirology, and astronomy; he was also a physician, perhaps a personal physician to the king of Aragon. In a time of intellectual upheaval and civil strife, when nobility was on the verge of being defined with legal precision as it had not been since antiquity, Guillelmus taught that true nobility is an acquired habit, not an inborn quality. Guillelmus wrote De nobilitate animi, “On Nobility of Mind,” around 1280–1290. Working in the recently renewed Aristotelian tradition, he took an independent and original approach, quoting from philosophers, astronomers, physicians, historians, naturalists, orators, poets, and rustics pronouncing proverbs. This edition presents the Latin text, based on six manuscripts, three of them hitherto unknown, along with an English translation. An introduction reviews Guillelmus’s life and work, considering his theory of nobility in the contexts of history, philosophy, and rhetoric, and studies the authorities he quotes with particular attention to the troubadours, lyric poets from the area known today as the south of France. An appendix of sources and analogues is also included.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, southern France witnessed first a burgeoning, then a decline in the poetry of women troubadours-trobairitz. These women stood both within and outside the troubadour tradition, so their work is interesting for social and literary-historical reasons as well as for its aesthetic merit. Many of their twenty-eight surviving poems are love songs in which the trobairitz expresses her desire with a freshness that places her in startling contrast with the speechless, unresponsive lady depicted in the poetry of male troubadours.The Voice of the Trobairitz includes eleven original studies by leading scholars in America and Europe. Approaching the trobairitz from varying perspectives, the authors ask such questions as: which poems are properly attributed to the women? Which poetic forms and techniques did they employ? Is there a distinctive feminine rhetoric in the poems, and do they attempt to mold the role offered them by the troubadours or do they subside into passivity? Paden's introduction describes the historical context of the trobairitz, and he includes a checklist of the poems, a meticulous bibliography, and an index.The Voice of the Trobairitz will be a valuable resource for all medieval scholars and students and for those interested in ' women's history.

Overturning the myth that medieval marriages were loveless, shown through a close analysis of troubadour poetry and historical recordsMedieval marriages are often understood to have been loveless, due partly to assumptions about arranged matches that have been reinforced by scholars who suggest that troubadour poetry was not concerned with love but rather with poetic form and structure. In this book, William Paden challenges that belief, using historical sources to argue that the songs of the troubadours reveal an inextricable link between desire and marriage.Paden analyzes twelfth- through fourteenth-century troubadour poetry from the Occitan region, which stretched across portions of medieval France, Catalonia, and Italy; visual art, both images and objects; a corpus of over a thousand marriage contracts; and various liturgical manuscripts. Tracing literary and artistic output alongside the evolution of the institution of marriage from late antiquity to the early and high Middle Ages, Paden demonstrates that the stereotype of loveless unions reflects modern scholarly bias more than medieval reality. Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours restores the period’s complexity, showing how desire and devotion often intertwined—and how courtly song reveals the relationship between the two.