The great flowering of lyric that occurred in the south of France during the early part of the twelfth century sowed many seeds that came to bloom in the north, one century later. The northern French trouv?res who wrote and sang in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took as their models many of the forms that the Provençal troubadours had invented long before. The troubadours were the first to create a tradition of vernacular poetry in the Middle Ages; no less a poet than Dante devoted an entire book to their brilliant poetic forms, and held them in such high esteem that he nearly wrote his Commedia in Provençal, not Italian. ? - Robert Mealy