This chapter is concerned with those few songs in the chansonniers which, on the basis of their discursive forms, might be classified as feminine chansons. I shall consider these songs in the light of the criteria developed in the course of Chapters 2, 4 and 5, criteria relating to discourse, desire and the chronotope. I shall not take up directly the question of authorship here, but remain in the realms of textual femininity, leaving that work to others. Nevertheless, I take it for granted that at least some of the songs attributed to women were in fact composed by women, in the North as in the South. The question of authorship does not allow itself to be entirely ignored, however, so we will return to it.

Doss-Quinby et al. include four feminine chansons in their anthology under the rubric chanson d'amour. This genre, they suggest, ‘treats a single subject, fin'amors – the true perfect love elaborated by the troubadours’ (114). I, however, prefer the simple term chanson, the northern equivalent of the Occitan canso, as I argued in Chapter 1.