Rhetoric and Ethics in Sordello's “Ensenhamen d'onor”

Sordello (fl. 1220-69) is an iconic but ambiguous figure. The greatest of Italian troubadours, he is an exemplar of uncompromising integrity for Dante, while the Occitan razos portray him as a rogue and political opportunist. Later hommages by Robert Browning and Roberto Bola o see him as a frustrated, dangerous and seductive figure. Sordello's poetry prepared that myth (cobla "si com estau" and canso "Atant ses plus viu hom"), but it is in his Proven al exile, when he left Italy and the scandals behind, and built a career as a diplomat for Charles of Anjou, that Sordello composed his most famous poem, Ensenhamen d'onor. It concerns patronage, chivalry, and courtly conduct. This commentary aims to "extricate from the sometimes stodgy rhetoric of mezura (moderation) and rectitude that the poet is desperately attempting to project, the poetic bite that characterizes his work in general, and the essential continuity that unites this 'moral treatise' with his more playful, gritty, and exuberant work."