Mining the Necropolis: On Reading Guillem de Berguedà

While the songs of Catalan nobleman and troubadour Guillem de Berguedà (fl. 1138–1192) have long attracted readers interested in satirical forms like the sirventes or in Catalan literary history, their violent, political nature has encouraged many to take a historical approach. In this article, I take a functional approach, understanding what Guillem’s lyric is by looking at what it does, in order to show how we might read troubadour lyric across generic and geographic lines. This approach reveals the important relationship between humor, violence, and deixis in these songs, which I use to show commonalities between two apparently dissimilar songs, “Cansoneta leu e plana” (BdT 210,8) and “Qan vei lo temps camjar e refrezir” (BdT 210,16).