''Vida'' () is the usual term for a brief prose biography, written in

Old Occitan Old Occitan ( oc, occitan ancian, label= Modern Occitan, ca, occità antic), also called Old Provençal, was the earliest form of the Occitano-Romance languages, as attested in writings dating from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Ol ...

, of a

troubadour A troubadour (, ; oc, trobador ) was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word ''troubadour'' is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a '' trobai ...

or trobairitz. The word ''vida'' means "life" in Occitan languages; they are short prose biographies of the

s, and they are found in some

chansonnier A chansonnier ( ca, cançoner, oc, cançonièr, Galician and pt, cancioneiro, it, canzoniere or ''canzoniéro'', es, cancionero) is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings ...

s, along with the works of the author they describe. Vidas are notoriously unreliable: Mouzat, while complaining that some scholars still believe them, says they represent the authors as "ridiculous bohemians, and picaresque heroes"; Alfred Jeanroy calls them "the ancestors of modern novels". Most often, they are not based on independent sources, and their information is deduced from literal readings of details of the poems. Most of the ''vidas'' were composed in Italy, many by Uc de Saint Circ. Additionally, some individual poems are accompanied by '' razos'', explanations of the circumstances in which the poem was composed.

Troubadours with ''vidas''

Sources

There is a complete collection of ''vidas'', with French translation and commentary, by Boutière and Schutz. *''Biographies des troubadours'', edd. and trans. J. Boutière and A.-H. Schutz. Paris: Nizet, 1964. There is a complete collection of English translations available as part of the Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series B, translated by Margarita Egan. *''The Vidas of the Troubadours'', ed. and trans. Margarita Egan. New York: Garland, 1984. .

References

{{reflist Occitan literary genres