Talk:Canso

The canso is the most important genre of troubadour lyric: it leads to the Northern French chanson,and it deserves a fairly large article. This is a genre of love poetry that gave rise to the northern French medieval chanson, that inspired Dante in his work to develop a vernacular literature, and that ... well, that recorded a rise in the status of women in medieval Occitania.

Many features identify the canso besides its "having a beginning, a middle, and an end." The most basic feature distinguishing the canso from sirventes or planh or other genres: the canso lyrics usually speak of love, praising the beloved.

The sentence "The canso can end with either a tornada or envoi" seems misleading -- I suggest omitting the word "either". Otherwise, I am wondering what distinction you make between a tornada and an envoi. As I understand it, the term envoi to refer to a section of a poem (the last part, the "postage stamp and address" part) is (Northern) French , but there's no real difference between a tornada and an envoi. The troubadours often used forms of the equivalent verb (Fr. envoyer) in the tornadas (which were not full-length stanzas, but half-stanzas with slightly different rules for rhyming with the rest of the poem).

Because it describes the canso in a way that also describes nearly every genre of poetry and prose (anything that starts with an exordium and ends with a conclusion), I would classify this article as a stub.

I'm afraid I know less about wikis than about troubadours. Perhaps this and related articles, here and in Wikipedia, are asking me to provide a bit more information and better references.