Everything about Marcabru totally explained
Marcabru (fl. 1130-1150) is one of the earliest
troubadours whose poems are known. There is no certain information about him; the two
vidas attached to his poems tell different stories, and both are evidently built on hints in the poems, not on independent information.
According to the brief life in MS. BNF 12473
Marcabrun was from
Gascony (details of the dialect of his poems support this) and was the son of a poor woman named Marcabruna. He made bad poems and bad satires, and spoke evil of women and of love. This evidently comes from a reading of poem 293,18.
According to the longer biography in MS. Vat. Lat. 5232
Marcabru was abandoned at a rich man's door, and no one knew his origin. He was brought up by
Aldric del Vilar, learned to make poetry from
Cercamon, was at first nicknamed
Pan-perdut and later
Marcabru. He became famous, and the lords of Gascony, about whom he'd said many bad things, eventually put him to death. This appears to be based on poems 16b,1 and 293,43 (an exchange between Aldric del Vilar and Marcabru) and guesswork; the link with Cercamon is doubted by modern scholars.
Forty-five poems are attributed to Marcabru, learned, often difficult, sometimes obscene, relentlessly critical of the morality of lords and ladies. He experimented with the
pastorela, which he uses to point out the futility of lust. One tells of how the speaker's advances are reviled by a shepherdess on the basis of class. Another tells of how a man's attempt to seduce a woman whose husband was at the
crusades is firmly rebuffed. He may also have originated the
tenso in a debate with
Uc Catola (as early as 1133) on the nature of love and the decline of courtly behaviour. Marcabru was a powerful influence on later poets who adopted the obscure
trobar clus style. Among his patrons were
William X of Aquitaine and, probably,
Alfonso VII of León. Marcabru may have travelled to Spain in the entourage of
Alfonso Jordan,
Count of Toulouse, in the 1130s. In the 1140s he was a propagandist for the
Reconquista and in his famous poem with the Latin beginning
Pax in nomine Domini! he called Spain a
lavador (washer) where knights could go to have their souls cleansed fighting the infidel.
Four
monophonic melodies to accompany Marcabru's poetry survive; additionally, three melodies of poems that may be
contrafacta of Marcabru's work may be attributed to him.
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