Abstract: This article focuses on the evocations of food and drink in the lyrics of Raimbaut d’Aurenga, a discussion organized under the headers: Fattening Up, Fishing and Hunting, Foods and Springtime, Bees and Honey, Spices and Herbs, and Eating, Drinking, Hunger, and Thirst. The culinary vocabulary plays into Raimbaut’s practice of trobar ric and his appreciation of rare rhymes and intricate forms. The careful use of beekeeping vocabulary suggests a more than casual interest in that occupation.
Abstract: This article argues that Arnaut Daniel’s canso “Lo ferm voler” and the sonnets of Giacomo da Lentini and of William Shakespeare share core structural principles despite their historical distance. Applying Mary Douglas’s model of ring composition and Giovanni Mari’s retrogradatio cruciata to a single array of end-words, or to structural placeholders functioning as variables, each tradition is reconstructed independently. Taken together and confirmed by the poems’ sources, the article’s findings, through recursivity, warrant the conclusion that the troubadour canso played a distinctive and formative role in the emergence and development of the sonnet.
