'THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only example of the form dating from t he Renaissance, though as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.) notes, it was Théodore de Banville’s “popular handbook Petit traité de poésie française, [that gave rise to] the mistaken belief that the villanelle was an antique form,” a belief that “persisted tenaciously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” In some contexts, the misapprehension persists: see, for example, the claims made on Poetica, aired regularly until somewhat recently on Australia’s national broadcast network: “The villanelle was embraced by the musician-poets of twelfth-century France; the troubadours of Provençal and the trouvères of the north, but its origin is Italian.”' (Introduction)
'THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only example of the form dating from t he Renaissance, though as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.) notes, it was Théodore de Banville’s “popular handbook Petit traité de poésie française, [that gave rise to] the mistaken belief that the villanelle was an antique form,” a belief that “persisted tenaciously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” In some contexts, the misapprehension persists: see, for example, the claims made on Poetica, aired regularly until somewhat recently on Australia’s national broadcast network: “The villanelle was embraced by the musician-poets of twelfth-century France; the troubadours of Provençal and the trouvères of the north, but its origin is Italian.”' (Introduction)