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The sirventes or serventes (Old Occitan[siɾvenˈtes]), sometimes translated as "service song", was a genre of Old Occitan lyric poetry practiced by the troubadours.
The name comes from sirvent ('serviceman'), from whose perspective the song is allegedly written.
Sirventes usually (possibly, always) took the form of parodies, borrowing the melody, metrical structure and often even the rhymes of a well-known piece to address a controversial subject, often a current event. The original piece was usually a canso, but there are sirventes written as contrafacta of (at least) sestinas and pastorelas.[1]
They were always opinionated, being either highly complimentary or, more often, oozing with vitriol; however, these features are not unique to the sirventes, so a piece can be positively identified as one only if its nature is explicitly stated in the text (which it often is) or the original piece it is based on has been preserved (which is also often the case: for a parody to work, it had to target a recognizable, therefore widely known, piece).
The first author known to have written a sirventes is Cercamon, the name of the genre was first mentioned by Marcoat, and the most famous practitioner of it was Bertran de Born; Peire de Vic was also known for his sirventes, but only one has survived to this day.
^Audiau, Jean (1923). La pastourelle dans la poésie occitane du Moyen Âge. Paris: E. De Boccard. p. 6.
The sirventes or serventes (Old Occitan [siɾvenˈtes]), sometimes translated as "service song", was a genre of Old Occitan lyric poetry practiced by the...
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sol sirventes l'an". The Hungarian scholar István Frank hypothesised that Bertran hailed from Parisot and re-classified his work as a sirventes. He has...
to seize the Kingdom of Majorca, which he claimed. Guillem wrote his sirventes before actual fighting had begun. His company was active in the area around...
Paris. His most famous work, the sirventes contra Roma ("sirventes against Rome", actually entitled D'un sirventes far), was a strong reprimand for the...
Amoros dau Luc was a troubadour who wrote a satirical sirventes, "En Chantarel, sirventes ab motz plas," which urged Henry III of England and his ally...
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language] from Limousin is of greater value for writing poems and cançons and sirventés; and across the whole of the lands where our tongue is spoken, the literature...
accusing the papacy of avarice. Somewhat later, Guilhem Figueira wrote a sirventes and repeated these accusations, asserting that greed was the primary factor...
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language, leaving behind five or six lyric poems (or fragments), including a sirventes and several tensos. His fame as a troubadour was enough that a vida of...
writing and music, and two poems are attributed to him. The first one is a sirventes in Old French, Dalfin je us voill desrenier, and the second one is a lament...
Vidal de Castelnou d'Ari wins the violeta d'or (golden violet) for a sirventes in praise of the Virgin Mary. At about this date, Raimon de Cornet writes...
attacking one Reculaire in the sirventes "Scometre.us vuoill, Reculaire". Huguet's most studied work is "D'un sirventes m'es pres talens", in which he...
the term sirventes to describe his poems; the word appears in both of his surviving works, twice in one: Mentre m'obri eis huisel, un sirventes escubel...
Majorca furnished material for new sirventesos and during this period the sirventes was converted into a convenient tool of political propaganda in which...
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