Flamenca

The thirteenth-century Old Occitan Romance of Flamenca light-heartedly critiques men-abasing courtly love, oppressive gender roles, and hypocritical pretenses predominant among trobairitz and troubadours writing and singing Old Occitan lyrics in medieval southern France. Apparently never widely disseminated, Flamenca was rediscovered in a manuscript in 1834. Flamenca is a creative, highly transgressive medieval verse tale. Nonetheless, for more than a century medieval scholars have comically misunderstood Flamenca to be a “novel of manners.”