A genre of lyric poetry most frequent in OF. In the classical type the narrator, who is sometimes identified as a knight, recounts his meeting with a shepherdess and his attempt to seduce her. Sometimes the narrator is humiliated, even beaten, or the shepherdess makes a clever escape; in other poems they make love, either with the consent of the shepherdess or by rape. Less frequent subgenres include the “augmented” p., which adds a shepherd lover or other members of the cast, with appropriate developments in the plot (the girl quarrels with Robin and the poet takes her away, etc.); the bergerie, in which the poet recounts his meeting with a group of peasants who dance and quarrel; and the pastoureau, in which the poet meets a shepherd and talks with him.
The Fr. term shows influence of Occitan pastorela in the retention of the s and in the treatment of the vowel spelled ou, and the genre seems to have originated in Occitan. There are antecedents or analogs in Med. Lat., among the Romance kharjas and in Chinese around the , but the classical p. took form with the troubadour Marcabru in the early 12th c. He was imitated in the same century in Occitan, Lat., and Fr. In the 13th c. the p. flowered in Fr.; continued in Occitan, with a hiatus around mid-century after which it was perhaps reintroduced under Fr. influence; was practiced in Lat. until the Carmina Burana and was introduced into Ger., It., and Galician-Portuguese. Fourteenth-c. Fr. poets dropped the p., but it inspired the invention of the serranilla more were written in Ger. and It., and a few in Gascon, Eng., and Welsh. We have Provencal, and serranillas in Sp. After the Middle Ages, the p. has been cultivated in poetry and folksong in Fr., Gascon, Catalan, Sp., and Eng.
The lyric genre has influenced other forms such as the Jeu de Robin et Marion (ca. 1283) by Adam de la Halle, which is a dramatization of a p., Mahieu le Poirier’s narrative Court d’amours (ca. 1300), and the Dit de la pastoure (1403) by Christine de Pisan. A shepherdess named Pastorella figures in an episode of Spenser’s Faerie Queene which is reminiscent of an augmented p. In Shakespeare’s Tempest the wooing of Ferdinand and Miranda recalls the cl. p., and the masque of reapers recalls the bergerie. Molière’s Dom Juan seduces two country girls in the medieval manner.
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