Gavaudan

Gavaudan ( 11951215, known in 1212–1213) was a troubadour and hired soldier () at the courts of both Raymond V and Raymond VI of Toulouse and later on in Castile. He was from Gévaudan, as his name (probably a nickname) implies. He wrote moralising lyrics, either religious or political, and ten of his works survive, including five sirventes, two pastorelas, one canso, one planh for an anonymous domna (lady), and one Crusade song. He is sometimes clumped in a primitive Marcabrunian "school" of poetry alongside Bernart Marti, Bernart de Venzac, and Peire d'Alvernhe. He developed a hermetic style, combining elements of the trobar ric and trobar clus.

==Pastorelas== Gavaudan composed two customarily dated to around 1200: and . They are one of the earliest and best examples of a subgenre of that, picking up on the themes of the earliest , in which quaint shepherdesses were easily seduced by noble men, and those of Marcabru and his school, wherein the witty shepherdesses rebuff the oafish knights, intermingled the two earlier themes into one, in which the shepherdess and the knight fall in love. In Gavaudan, the knight and the shepherdess turn to each other in retreat from the dreariness of their normal lives, and their love is true, but not courtly love.