Taylor, Edgar [Hrsg.]; Austin, Sarah [Hrsg.]: Lays of the minnesingers or German troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Illustr. by specimens of the contemporary lyric poetry of Provence and other parts of Europe ; With histor. and crit. notes, and engravings from the ms. of the minnesingers in the king's library at Paris, and from other sources (London, 1825)

CASTILLE. 37

particular as to time and place, and fixes the aera
when the gallant knights of the South of France
could have learnt the songs of the Moors, at the
taking of Toledo in 1085. Unfortunately, Mr. Ray-
nouard has published a Provencal poem anterior to
1000 ; and the finished versification of the earliest
known specimens gives us every reason to suppose
the Troubadour muse to have been long cultivated.
Unfortunately, too, the Spaniards themselves (with
whom these French knights fought, and whose lite-
rature, though at a much later period, has the most
resemblance to that of the Moors,) have nothing in
the least approaching to the character of the Trouba-
dour poetry till they imitated it in later ages; and
moreover, the earliest school of Spanish poetry is
that which bears least affinity to the Oriental.

It is almost vain to ask upon what grounds this
supposed derivation of the Provencal love-songs from
the Arabs could rest. One would naturally be at a
loss to think it probable that a poetry founded on a
devoted idolatry of woman, and her absolute supre-
macy in the social system, should have sprung from
a people whose principles lead to conclusions totally
the reverse; or that those of the Christians, who fled to
mountain fastnesses, and only met their moslem foes
for deadly combat, should make them their masters
in the fine arts. When indeed the Christians after-
wards gained the ascendancy, the population might