Abstract: Raimbaut d’Aurenga’s gaps are usually seen as infamously inaccessible: clever, self-referential, ironic, prickly, even recalcitrant, and they have defied, for the most part, definitive interpretation. In this article, I argue that that inaccessibility is largely selective on Raimbaut’s part and, that given access to the key to interpretation that he sometimes refers to, we might arrive at understandings of his work that were largely unavailable to twelfth-century court audiences or required extensive veiling. Read today through the insights of queer theory and trans philology, we can offer tentative readings of his work that stay close to the surface of the text and emphasize his interest in technique as well as subtext: poetry as specialized dissent, available to artistic groups of selected fellow poets and insider audiences. A master of trobar clus — hermeneutically sealed rhetoric reliant on invented vocabulary, unexpected similes and metaphors, and imprecise referents — Raimbaut chose to redirect poetic energy away from the love topoi that he was raised with and direct it toward metaphysical and transgressive alternatives that involved self-analysis; psychic connections between nature and the human body; and the changing hierarchies between lord and jongleur , men and women, and the artist and community standards that confined him.
William Burgwinkle (Thu,) studied this question.