The concept of the great courtly song, along with its more generic - but theoretically "stronger" - antecedent, that of formal poetry, has conditioned, for good or ill, thinking on medieval lyric poetry over the last four or five decades. However, we have the impression that for a long time now, in the communis opinio of critics, the two concepts have been so simplified and popularized that they have been open to a whole series of objections, particularly from those in favor of an approach more sensitive to the ideological and cultural depth of the texts and their authors. It is therefore only by re-examining the original meaning given to these two concepts by their inventor, Robert Guiette, that we can attempt to show to what extent they may yet prove useful and effective in current research.
When we consider the most general principles of Guiette's thinking, we first realize that, in principle, he regarded formal poetry as a typically medieval stylistic modality, in which the rhetorical-musical structure appears inseparable from a content that is ideologically determined, so to speak, whereas, in his view, the grand chant courtois would have been a genuine genre, which developed in a very specific historical and cultural milieu - that of the aristocratic poets of Oïl before the third decade of the xiii century - without any possibility of abusive extension to other lyrical realities. Secondly, Guiette saw the founding element of formal poetry in a communicative typology that, according to the acquisitions of post-Bachtinian criticism, could be called "interdiscursive"; this means that, to understand the meaning of this poetry, it is necessary to fix one's attention not on the isolated text, but on the textual series of which it is a part: for the creator of poetry as for his audience, what really counts is the experience of seriality.
Having said that, we can add that two elements have helped to reinforce "genre awareness" among Oïl poets and the contemporary public of the great courtly song: firstly, the obvious structural and thematic homogeneity of the texts, since the chanson form is only used to produce works whose subject matter is of an amorous nature, expressed in the formulas of the effusion of feelings and treated within the consolidated framework of the ideology of courtly love; secondly, the clear and essentially binary opposition between chanson and the fixed-form poetic genres, which are often (but not exclusively) of popular origin. On the other hand, the Occitan canso, which is nevertheless the embodiment of a formal art founded on foundations very similar to those of the great trouvère song, cannot be so categorically defined as the "standard form" of troubadour love poetry, since, while remaining virtually unaltered throughout the course of Oc literature, it does not exclusively embrace the erotic theme, but drains a much richer and more varied range of content.
What makes Occitan canso so different from the great courtly song is the "hetero-reference quotient" that characterizes it - i.e., the ability to accommodate in the poetic text a series of indications, references and impulses foreign to the line of self-anamnesis typical of lyric discourse. The presence of a very high "heteroreference quotient" means that the canso is open to a whole series of rhetorical and discursive themes and strategies that the great courtly song, in principle, ignores. In particular, while the trouvères' relationship between each text belonging to the genre of the grand chant courtois and its "confrères" can easily be described, as mentioned above, using the notion of interdiscursivity, the troubadours seem to favor intertextual links for their texts, which are more marked precisely from the point of view of reference.
