Cerveri de Girona, “Entr’Arago e Navarra jazia” (BdT 434.7a)

The rubric in Chansonnier Sg classifies “Entr’Arago e Navarra jazia” by Cerveri de Girona as a ‘sompni’ (‘dream’). Thirteenth-century Occitan and Catalan arts of poetry define the ‘sompni’ as a minor thematic genre in which the poet recounts events which took place in a dream (“en durmen”). On the basis of the rubric in Sg and the definition in the treatises, the only hints at the existence of the genre, this paper will outline a small corpus of five/six troubadour poems based on the narration of a dream and significant examples of ‘sompni’. The hypothesis that a ‘genre’ defined as sompni exsisted and circulated beyond Occitania is furthermore linked to similar compositions by Paolo Lanfranchi, a thirteenth-century poet from Pistoia, and to some ‘cantigas de amigo’ by Johan Mendiz de Briteyros, a Galician-Portuguese troubadour. The paper will also seek to demonstrate the loss of a line in the final stanza, so far unnoticed by previous editors, and suggest a date for the poem around 1276.