Arnaut Daniel, *Ribérac Castle (prov. Dordogne), Provençal troubadour of noble origin. His activity coincided with the period of the full flowering of troubadour art (1180–1200). For a long time, he stayed in England as a juggler at the court of Richard the Lionheart and also travelled to Italy and Spain. Arnaut was the creator of difficult and elitist poetry; initiated the hermetic way of writing, the so-called trobar ric e clus, which involves obscuring the meaning of the poem and using an elaborate formal structure. He introduced an elaborate form of sestina, which was modelled on, among others, Dante. Arnaut’s only sestine preserved with a melody, Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra, consists of 6 six-line stanzas, with rhymed words repeated in all stanzas, changing places according to a complex pattern. The melody of the first stanza is repeated in the next one and represents the type of ode continua. In addition to the sestina, one song with musical notation and 16 poems without melody have survived. Arnaut’s work gained him the reputation of a master of poetic form and metaphor and was also a source of admiration in later times. Dante introduced him to the Divine Comedy (Purgatory, Canto XXVI) with quotations in Provençal, imitating his poetic style, while Petrarch called Arnaut “the great master of love,” at the same time considering him the most outstanding of troubadours.
Literature: U.A. Canello La vita e le opere del trovatore Arnalde Daniello, Halle 1883; R. Lavaud Les poésies d’Arnaut Daniel, Toulouse 1910 (critical ed. based on Canello with French transl. and note transcription); F. Gennrich Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours, 3 vol., Darmstadt 1958–65; J. Boutière, A.H. Schutz Biographies des troubadours, Paris 1964; J. Maillard Anthologie de chants de troubadours, Nice 1967.
