What’s in a Word?

Abstract

Stephen Nichols’s text analyzes one of the most famous examples of troubadour lyric, Peire d’Alverna’s Occitan canso Cantarai d’aqestz trobadors (‘I’ll sing about these troubadours’). Nichols explores its formal, linguistic, and epistemological character, its status in the broader literary-historical context of the late twelfth century, and its relevance for contemporary theoretical debates about conceptual knowledge.