Troubadour poetry is composed for public performance; it concerns the pursuit of alleged courtship, or discusses matters of courtly interest. Of constant importance in it, therefore, is a vast vocabulary, rhetoric and thematic of social insertion. I shall consider some of these in order to investigate how far the first-person position in the songs is bound up with group identities of various kinds, such as gender, social peer groups, patrons and audiences. The relevance of this inquiry has already emerged in the discussion of Köhler's view of the subject as a synecdoche for the social group (Chapter 1); in the question of how far allegories of the ‘self’ are individualizing and how far they are generalizing; in the construction of a gender hierarchy; and in the splitting of the subject voice by interventions that seem to represent forces of social control, courtly or clerical (Chapter 2). It is evident that the self with which the subject, however uneasily, identifies, is historically and politically produced in ways that need to be analysed.

This analysis is divided between two chapters. In Chapter 4, the focus is on the poet as performer and on the first person's transactions with audiences, patrons, rivals and lovers.