Villanelles

Preceded by a historical and critical note on the villanelle with a technical villanelle.

"Villanelle, from the Italian villanella, derived from the Latin villanus (peasant), is, in literature, a kind of small pastoral poetry with a fixed form and divided into verses that end with the same refrain. In music, it is an ancient rustic dance accompanied by singing as well as a melody, an instrumental tune composed on the model of this dance.

The strict form described by Joseph Boulmier (void below) is an invention of the 18th century and does not date back to the Middle Ages or the 16th century, contrary to what some poetic treatises claim. According to Julie Kane, "the villanelle was a ruse fabricated by an eighteenth-century priest and made popular by a nineteenth-century satirist, based on the example of a single pre-existing specimen. "According to Boulmier, the fixed form is the creation of Berthelin, in the 1751 reprint of Richelet's dictionary of rhymes. The model is Passerat's poem. This one has almost nothing in common with the eighteen villanelles (or villanesques) of the 16th century. The origin of the term is the sixteenth-century Italian musical villanella, whose poetic form has nothing fixed or similar to Passerat's poem".