The Pastourelle as a Popular Genre

Orality is the salient characteristic of the medieval lyric, in particular fom the Gallo-Romance tradition, not only because it was destinated for oral performance and hence aural reception, but mainly because from the beginning it ha a musical dimension inseparable from the words. The Pastourelle represents an exemple of the secondary orality, according the idealized categories proposed by Paul Zumthor, because it has figures from the pastoral world, who have been incorporated into poetry from a courtly milieu, not by chance, but rather so as to allude, at least in the original intentions of its inventor Marcabru, to a poetic tradition that belongs to the pastoral world and has a long history behind it, starting to Greec bucolic poetry. The existence of an expressive pattern analogous to the adopted by Marcabru and the identical way in which the poem is also set in the pastoral world in the Greek and later Latin traditions invite the extension of the study in a diachronic and diatopic direction.