Do we think this is the result of some sort of cultural transmission from Arab al-Andalus?
D.R.: Well, whether the troubadour tradition derives from the Arabic lyric tradition is probably one of the most conflicted academic questions of at least the last century. Those who work from the question primarily from the European side, that is scholars of Romance languages and of Latin, see the troubadours as, yes, something new and innovative, but they see the origins of all of this as springing from popular lyric poetry, which we do not have in writing, do not have historical documentation of, but which clearly for them existed as a sub-stratum to high Latin poetry. People who have worked primarily with the Arabic tradition look at troubadour poetry and see just an astonishing number of parallels. All of these elements that I’ve just listed are found in very typical Arabic love poetry. So from an Arabist point of view, it’s almost impossible to think that all of these different themes, all of these different motifs and tropes could have sprung up completely independently in south
