Troubadours

Abstract

Dante was not only artistically inspired by the troubadours, he also constructed his life and œuvre through an uncanny engagement with their example as political and poetic figures. From an early introduction to their innovative styles and topics, through an exile that echoed their own, some eighty years earlier, he found in them models for his art and for his own unwitting travels. Like them, in exile, and in thrall to patrons and causes, composing on demand, suffering the indignities of misunderstanding and old age, he produced work in his later years which references their own and in which they themselves sometimes play a part. Using Bruno Latour’s notion of the network, this chapter argues for a new reading of Dante and the troubadours, one which sees him as working within such a vortex, passing through the work of his predecessors and serving as a mediator for poetic knowledge.