Arnaut de Mareuil

Arnaut standing amidst an initial S in a 13th-century chansonnier.

Arnaut de Mareuil (fl. late 12th century) was a troubadour, composing lyric poetry in the Occitan language. Twenty-five, perhaps twenty-nine, of his songs, all cansos, survive, six with music.

His name indicates that he came from Mareuil-sur-Belle in Périgord. He is said to have been a "clerk" from a poor family who eventually became a jongleur; he settled at the courts of Toulouse and then Béziers. He apparently loved the countess Azalais, daughter of Raymond V of Toulouse, married to Roger II Trencavel, and Arnaut's surviving poems may be seen as a sequence (lyric cycle) telling of his love. Alfonso II of Aragon was his rival for Azalais's affections, and according to the razó to one of Arnaut's poems, the king jealously persuaded her to break off her friendship with Arnaut. He fled to Montpellier, where he found a patron in count William VIII. Arnaut's cantaire (singer) and jongleur (minstrel, messenger) was Pistoleta.

Fortune

It is sometimes reported that Arnaut de Mareuil surpassed his more famous contemporary Arnaut Daniel him in elegant simplicity of form and delicacy of sentiment; however, this is based on the personal opinion of an editor of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and against the consensus of both past and modern scholars: Dante, Petrarch, Pound and Eliot, who were familiar with both authors consistently proclaim Daniel's supremacy, and even Arnaut de Mareuil's curator, Simon Gaunt, writing 25 years later, makes no mention of such claim.

References

• Biographies des troubadours, ed. J. Boutière, A.-H. Schutz. Paris: Nizet, 1964. pp. 32-38.
• Gaunt, Simon, and Kay, Sarah (edd.) The Troubadours: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0 521 574730.
• Johnston, R. C. Les poèsies lyriques du troubadour Arnaut de Mareuil. Paris, 1935.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)