We know little about how troubadour lyrics were originally performed. They were songs set to music and they were ‘courtly’ in that they were composed for performance at court, but how they were performed and by whom is open to question: the refined nature of many cansos suggests an intimate setting, while the more raucous tone of many other genres suggests a more extended public. Whatever the context of performance, interaction with an audience is intrinsic to the rhetoric of troubadour poetry, as are allusions to known individuals and textual flourishes that lend themselves to dramatic exploitation. While lyrics may have been performed by their composers, they were also undoubtedly performed by others: like the scripts of plays, they are the starting point for multiple and diverse fictional performances.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries troubadour lyrics were gathered into elaborate manuscripts that are organised by troubadour or genre. The poor rate of survival of melodies suggests that when these chansonniers were compiled their reading public was more interested in texts than melodies, but the displacement effected by the chansonniers is not simply a transposition from song to script: there is a chronological gap of at least 150 years between the composition of the earliest lyrics and the chansonniers; furthermore although some chansonniers were produced in Occitania, the majority are Italian or Catalan. In the chansonniers, each stanza constitutes a ‘paragraph’ and line-endings are marked by full-points (line-stops); this layout indicates that the stanza is the main unit of composition and gives rhyme less prominence than on the printed page.