Thibaut de Champagne at the Crossroads between the Troubadours and the Trouvères

This article situates Thibaut de Champagne as a pivotal figure in the reception and transmission of Occitan lyric in France, while at the same time tracing his influence on thirteenth-century developments among the troubadours. In charting courtly lyric's expansion northwards, I examine the evolution of the pastorela and the partimen, the latter essentially unpracticed in the north before 1200, while the referral to arbitration native to the French jeu-parti, and Marian song, rhetorically rooted in courtly love song, spread southwards after Thibaut's death. In addition, the penchant for supervising the compilation of one's own œuvre, a privilege of princes and one most likely engaged in by Thibaut, is visible in the manuscripts of Guiraut Riquier, whose corpus reflects the fluidity of generic boundaries which marked trouvère manuscripts of the preceding generation.