Alais, Yselda, and Carenza

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Alais and Yselda (or Iselda, from Isold) were two young noble trobairitz, probably sisters or nuns, who wrote an Occitan tenso with an elderly woman named Carenza. Their poem beings Na Carenza al bel cors avinen ("Lady Carenza of the lovely, gracious body") and the first two stanzas were composed by Alais and Yselda. It is the last two stanzas, composed by Carenza, that are the most difficult to interpret. Magda Bogin and Peter Dronke have read the opening line of both her stanzas as beginning with the address N'Alais i na Iselda ("Lady Alais and lady Yselda"). There is, however, an alternative interpretation that sees the address as to a "N'Alaisina Iselda". Under this interpretation, there are two, not three, interlocutors in the poem: Carenza and Alaisina Yselda (sometimes Alascina, both diminutives of Alais). Within the poem in favour of the multiplicity of younger women is the phrase nos doas serors ("us two sisters"), but against it is the continuous use of the first person singular. The poem is preserved amidst a collection of coblas esparsas in only one Italian chansonnier.