SOURCE: Burgwinkle, William E. “Economics, Poetry, and Patronage.” In Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus, pp. 33-74. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

In the following essay, Burgwinkle analyzes some of Uc de Saint Circ's financial relationships with his patrons.

We must rid ourselves of the ingrained notion that the economy is a field of experience of which human beings have necessarily always been conscious. To use a metaphor, the facts of the economy were originally embedded in situations that were not in themselves of an economic nature, neither the ends nor the means being primarily material. … Neither time nor history has provided us with those conceptual tools required to penetrate the maze of social relationships in which the economy is embedded.

(Polanyi and Arensberg, 74 and 242; cited in LeGoff, 20)

Troubadour poetry has traditionally been read as an elaborately rhetorical, collective meditation on seduction and erotic frustration...