The Medieval Origins of Ballet: Troubadours, Trobairitz, and the Emergence of Courtly Dance in the West

The troubadours of twelfth-century southern France are well-known and well-studied. With their inventive prosody, versification, vernacularization, and rhyming schemes, these iconic love lyricists devised highly original poetic love songs that were sung, set to music, and performed at feudal courts. What is perhaps less well-known, however, is that the troubadours and trobairitz (their female counterparts) composed love songs specifically for dancers, and occasionally represented courtly dancing in their poetry.