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TROUBADOUR CONTACTS

WITH MUSLIM SPAIN AND KNOWLEDGE OF ARABIC NEW EVIDENCE CONCERNING WILLIAM IX OF AQUITAINE

The problem of the origins of troubadour poetry in the XHth century continues to be one of the most baffling in the study of medieval literature. The lack of clearly identifiable precursors from whom troubadours derived the basic elements of their verse led long ago to the formulation of scholarly hypotheses which attempted to trace those elements back to a number of different possible roots 1 . One of those hypotheses, the Arabist thesis, maintains that the earliest troubadours were inspired by, and borrowed from, Arabic poets in Muslim Spain whom they encountered during the Spanish Reconquest of the Xlth and Xllth centuries. This borrowing explains, according to this view, the striking resemblances between the love poetry written by the two sets of poets. The Arabist theory

1 . For surveys of the question see Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love. A Critical Study of European Scholarship, Manchester, 1977, p. 1-99, and Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History : A Forgotten Heritage, Philadelphia, 1987, p. 71-90; and a recent article is by Roy Rosenstein, Andalusian and Trobador Love Lyric : From Source Seeking to Comparative Analysis, in ZRPh, t. 106 (1990), p. 339-53.