Coblas

A ''cobla esparsa'' ( literally meaning "scattered stanza") in Old Occitan is the name used for a single-stanza poem in troubadour poetry. They constitute about 15% of the troubadour output, and they are the dominant form among late (after 1220) authors like Bertran Carbonel and Guillem de l'Olivier.Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, edd. (1999), ''The Troubadours: An Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). The term ''cobla triada'' is used by modern scholars to indicate a ''cobla'' taken from a longer poem and let stand on its own, but its original medieval meaning was a ''cobla esparsa'' taken from a larger collection of such poems, since ''coblas esparsas'' were usually presented in large groupings.

Sometimes, two authors would write a cobla esparsa each, in a ''cobla'' exchange; this corresponds, in a shorter form, to the earlier ''tenso'' or ''partimen''.Martín de Riquer (1964), Història de la Literatura Catalana, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Ariel), 509ff. Whether such exchanges should be regarded as a "genre" unto themselves, as a type of short ''tenso'', or as ''coblas esparsas'', one of which happens to be written in response to the other, is debated. The Cançoneret de Ripoll distinguishes between the ''cobles d'acuyndamens'', which bonds of vassallage, love, or fidelity, and ''cobles de qüestions'', which posed dilemmas. The ''acuyndamentum'' was a special bond of vassallage-fidelity in medieval Catalonia.

Sources

{{Western medieval lyric forms

Occitan literature
Poetic forms
Western medieval lyric forms
Occitan literary genres