What woman sings here?

It has been found that many Arabic and Hebrew strophic poems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries ended with lines in romance-dialect. The sophisticated poems, amorous or panegyrical, sung at the Andalusian courts, had this end-piece appropriate to the woman-singer. Usually these pieces were simple and direct, quite different from the poem to which they were attached.

It seems clear that the Arabic or Hebrew poet used the small romance-song as his starting point, the basis of his own invention. For instance, an Arabic poet took a romance love-song (often a well-known one) and built out of it his own more elaborated work.

Thus al-Tutili (c 1125) takes a romance-triplet in which a girl cries that her lover is sick with love and needs a doctor. He uses the same rhymes in a more sophisticated tripled about fire and water mixing, and uses a refrain in this system after each stanza (AAAA, BBBB and so on). There are five stanzas in all. In the last stanza he ends:

I’ve been abandoned, sick and wasting way,
but then she sings, half-serious, half in play:

and he cries out the originating triplet in which the girl speaks and which was called the jarcha (refrain, literally departure: compare the Troubadour’s tornada turning away).

The interesting thing is that the jarcha is always in its romance-form a folksong for a woman, a Fraulenlied,, a winileoda or cantiga de amiga.

-- Jack Lindsay, The Troubadours and their world (165)