An Introduction to Old Occitan

An Introduction to Old Occitan is the only textbook in print for learning the language used by the troubadours in southern France during the Middle Ages. Each of the thirty-two chapters discusses a subject in the study of the language and includes an exercise based on a reading of an Occitan text that has been edited afresh for this volume. An accompanying compact disc includes discussion of the pronunciation of the language, with illustrations from the texts in the book.

William D. Paden is Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. A specialist in literature of the Middle Ages, he was co-editor with the late Mario Trovato of a 13th-century philosophical treatise in Latin, Guillelmus de Aragonia, De Nobilitate Animi (2012); co-author with Frances Freeman Paden of a book of English verse translations, Troubadour Poems from the South of France (2007); editor of essay collections on Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (2000), The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s (1994), and The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (1989); editor of The Medieval Pastourelle (1987); and co-editor of The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born (1986). He was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship in 2011 for a project on "Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours.