Trobairitz is a term in Occitan, the language of southern France, for women who compose lyrics; trobairitz are the female counterparts to the troubadours; the noun trobairitz can be singular or plural. Some twenty women are known by name as composers of poetry in the south of France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to which count must be added the authors of a number of anonymous works. The corpus consists of perhaps fifty lyrics, complete and fragmentary, but there is scholarly disagreement about the total number. [...]

The manuscript tradition of the trobairitz is, unsurprisingly, smaller than that of their male counterparts, and in some cases, certain pieces have been preserved due to their particular typology. For instance, dialogic texts —referred to as tenso or partimen in troubadour lyric poetry— are often found in multiple chansonniers, thanks to the renown of the troubadour with whom the trobairitz engaged.  [...]

The medieval Occitan vidas (‘lives’) serve as mini-biographies of authors; built on a Latin model, they range in length from two sentences to several paragraphs long. Their purpose seems to be to give the audience a sense of the author of a given work and his or her place in the world. [...]

The Oïl-language pastourelle attracted the attention of some of the most important romanists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The French pastourelle is distinguished from the Occitan one by a certain lack of ideological positioning and by the fact that it mostly employs ‘popularising’ metrical-musical structures, often with a refrain. [...]

Although Ab lo cor trist appears in the bibliographies of Provençal lyric poetry, it is actually a Catalan planh attributed to an anonymous female poet. The composition likely dates to the second half of the 14th century. However, the presence of an Italian caesura in line 28, a feature that fell out of use at the beginning of the 14th century, could suggest an earlier date.

The salutz d'amor, or simply salutz, is a love letter in verse directed by a troubadour to his beloved lady. Among the twenty salutz composed by troubadours, Azalais d'Altier's is unique as the sole example of this poetic genre written by a trobairitz and addressed to another woman.