A ''razo'' (, literally "cause", "reason") was a short piece of
Occitan Occitan may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain.
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France.
* Occitan language
Occitan (; o ...
prose detailing the circumstances of a
troubadour composition. A ''razo'' normally introduced an individual poem, acting as a prose preface and explanation; it might, however, share some of the characteristics of a ''
vida
Vida means “life” in Spanish and Portuguese. It may refer to:
Geography
* Vida (Gradačac), village in Bosnia and Herzegovina
* Lake Vida, Victoria Valley, Antarctica
* U.S. settled places:
** Vida, Montana
** Vida, Oregon
** Vida, Missour ...
'' (a biography of a troubadour, describing his origins, his loves, and his works) and the boundary between the two genres was never sharp.
In the ''
chansonnier
A chansonnier ( ca, cançoner, oc, cançonièr, Galician and pt, cancioneiro, it, canzoniere or ''canzoniéro'', es, cancionero) is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings o ...
s'', the manuscript collections of medieval troubadour poetry, some poems are accompanied by a prose explanation whose purpose is to give the reason why the poem was composed. These texts are occasionally based on independent sources. To that extent, they supplement the ''vidas'' in the same manuscripts and are useful to modern literary and historical researchers. Often, however, it is clear that assertions in the ''razos'' are simply deduced from literal readings of details in the poems. Most of the surviving ''razo'' corpus is the work of
Uc de Saint Circ, composed in Italy between 1227 and 1230.
In one case, a manuscript from
Bergamo
Bergamo (; lmo, Bèrghem ; from the proto- Germanic elements *''berg +*heim'', the "mountain home") is a city in the alpine Lombardy region of northern Italy, approximately northeast of Milan, and about from Switzerland, the alpine lakes Como ...
, there is an explanatory rubric preceding the Occitan
partimen ''Si paradis et enfernz son aital'' by
Girard Cavalaz and
Aycart del Fossat is in
Latin.
Sources
*
* Boutière, Jean; Schutz, Alexander Herman. ''Biographies des troubadours: textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècle''. Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1964.
* Poe, Elizabeth W
"At the Boundary between ''Vida'' and ''Razo'': The Biography of Raimon Jordan."''Neophilologus'', 72:2 (Apr., 1988) pp. 316–319.
* Schutz, A. H
"Where Were the Provençal ''Vidas'' and ''Razos'' Written?"''Modern Philology'', 35:3 (Feb., 1938), pp. 225–232.
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See also
*''
Linquo coax ranis
''Linquo coax ranis'' are the first words of a two-line poem in internally rhymed hexameters by Serlo of Wilton. The complete text is:
:''Linquo coax ranis, cras corvis, vanaque vanis;
:Ad logicam pergo que mortis non timet ergo.''
:I leave croak ...
'', a Latin equivalent
Occitan literary genres