In the preface to his Six Troubadour Songs, W. D. Snodgrass writes: "In the last two decades, our vision of the Provençal Troubadour and his songs has almost completely changed. Gone is the wistful figure singing sweetly in the twilight of his spiritual devotion to a far-off, idealized lady. Under the impact of certain crucial musicologists and performers—especially Thomas Binkley's Studio for Early Music in Munich—we have accepted a heavy Arabic influence in this music; nowadays, our performances sound more and more like belly-dance music or, more accurately, the Andalusian music of North Africa. Our sense of the texts has altered comparably. By now, we are almost ready to say that Troubadour songs have only two subjects: one, let's go Crusading and kill lots of Moors; two, let's go get in the boss's wife."

Now this is ridiculous on several counts. Naturally in recent studies...