Occitan literature is primarily identified with the troubadours and usually said to begin around the time of the first known example, Guilhem IX (1071–1127), even though, for two centuries before Guilhem, many works known as ‘pre-troubadour texts’ survive. This chapter begins by following the tentative openings onto a literature in Occitan of these texts from ca. the early tenth to the late eleventh centuries, discussing them in terms of their language, form, and manuscript context, and stressing their accidental or contingent character. It then documents how medieval people represent the troubadours: long after the death of Guilhem IX, grammarians (from around 1200) and manuscript compilers (from 1254) point to a range of different potential beginnings for troubadour poetry, now recognized as an ongoing tradition, but none identifies a ‘first troubadour’ earlier than the 1130s or 1140s. The works of Guilhem IX are a conundrum, then, since their composition comes after the end of the pre-troubadour openings, but before an identifiable beginning has begun. Guilhem’s songs are paradoxical in presenting similarities with pre-troubadour texts yet also serving as a reference point for poets of the 1130s and 1140s.

Chapter 5 identifies the refrain as an axis between Latin and vernacular song, focusing on what the concentration of contrafacts in three unique manuscripts (the St-Victor Miscellany, Engelberg Codex, and Red Book of Ossory) reveals concerning the interpenetration of song cultures and their languages across Europe. Refrain songs in these notated and unnotated sources feature parallel forms of scribal evidence and intervention that illustrate long-standing interactions between Latin and vernacular refrains through contrafacture and offer insight into the multilingual communities behind the Latin refrain song repertoire. Two of the three sources - the St-Victor Miscellany and Red Book of Ossory - transmit only unnotated songs, moreover, while the Engelberg Codex lacks notation for six of its nine marginally annotated songs. This chapter suggests that the vernacular fragments, or refrains, behave in many ways like musical notation; knowledge of the melody attached to a given vernacular text (typically a refrain) enables the musical realization of the Latin poem. Independently of one another, the St-Victor Miscellany, Engelberg Codex, and the Red Book of Ossory treat the Latin and vernacular refrain in similar ways by using the refrain to initiate formal links across language and generate musical meaning in the absence of notation.