Mediaevalia

After many years of relative neglect, the Old Occitan cobla (a stanza-length verse composition) has begun receiving its due. Considerable attention has been paid to establishing its typology and function within the Old Occitan lyric tradition,¹ its manuscript transmission and reception history,² its connection to the vida and razo tradition,³ and its importance in the literary afterlife of the troubadours in the form of quotations.⁴ Whereas critical editions of the anonymous coblas esparsas ("scattered," or isolated, stanza compositions) appeared occasionally in scholarly journals—mostly toward the beginning of the twentieth century—there is now a critical edition of the complete anonymous coblas esparsas at the disposition of Occitanists around the world.⁵ By all appearances, the cobla is being rehabilitated from its former status of subordinate genre. Indeed, if we consider that the cobla accounts for 19 percent of the troubadour texts in our possession today, coming in a close third behind the sirventes (satirical song) for its representation in Old Occitan chansonniers (medieval songbook manuscripts), then, in terms of sheer quantity, the cobla is one of the three major genres of troubadour poetry.⁶

If its form can be easily defined as a short, single-stanza verse composition, the cobla as a literary genre resists categorization. Its content ranges from moral, didactic, and religious to bilious, scatalogical, and out-and-out obscene.⁷ However, much of the cobla's variform subject matter is due to its different functions in troubadour literature and in the manuscript transmission of troubadour texts. Elizabeth Wilson Poe identifies four forms of coblas: inserted coblas, cobla-exchanges, extracted coblas, and isolated coblas.⁸ Inserted coblas are apocryphal stanzas that can be inserted by [End Page 143] a joglar or scribe into another author's text. Cobla-exchanges are brief literary quarrels in which two or more poets exchange stanzas on a given topic. Extracted coblas, or coblas triadas, are coblas excerpted from a longer lyric text, such as a canso (love song) or sirventes, and preserved in cobla anthologies. Coblas triadas are also very commonly integrated into longer narrative works, such as the novas of Raimon Vidal or the Breviari d'amor of Matfre Ermengaud.⁹ Finally, the isolated cobla, or the cobla esparsa, is an original stanzaic composition that imitates the metrical form and melody of another poem.¹⁰

In this article, I describe the cobla's function as a motor for literary reception and imitation of the troubadours in medieval Italy. I argue that the cobla triada and the cobla esparsa represent two different phases of the reception history of troubadour lyric in Northern Italy: the compilation and diffusion of canonical literary models in the form of the coblas triadas, and the emulation of these models that we find in collections of coblas esparsas. In Section 1, I begin with a brief analysis of the coblas triadas, which, according to the vida of the Italian compiler of an anthology of coblas triadas, Master Ferrari de Ferrara, were meant to provide condensed forms of troubadour verse that were designed to be both studied and imitated by aspiring troubadours. I argue that the compilation of these coblas is connected to the study of sententiae, or maxims, in the medieval Latin curriculum in Italy. Through an analysis of the grammatical and rhetorical functions of sententiae in the school curriculums in medieval Italy and the connection that exists between Latin anthologies of sententiae and Ferrari's project of compilation, I assert that the coblas triadas had two main functions in the reception history of Occitan lyric in Italy that correspond to those of sententiae in the Latin curriculum. The first of these functions was grammatical, inasmuch as this anthology of extracted passages provided access to the verba optima of the troubadours; and the second was rhetorical, as these coblas were destined to be a storehouse of vocabulary, structures, tropes, and expressions that could be deployed in original compositions.

In Section 2, I connect this practice of compiling short, memorizable specimens of the troubadours' works in the coblas triadas with that of the coblas esparsas...