The 12th and 13th centuries, the peak of the Middle Ages, saw the art of trouvères flourish throughout northern France, following their Occitan precursors, the troubadours. They decline courtly love in all its forms and this recording presents us with this extraordinary variety of musical styles (monodic singing, accompanied by instruments, polyphonies with two or three voices, instrumental dances, motets, clauses, etc.).

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Without worrying about completeness, this recording favors the most aristocratic style of song, considered by contemporaries to be of the highest quality: the grand courtly song, or "cantus coronatus" of the theoreticians of the 13th century. With the exception of Colin Muset's song "Devers Chastelvilain", all the other pieces more or less belong to this aristocratic style. The Lady's love is of course the central theme, codified, inaccessible, sacred love, in which beauty and carnal desire nevertheless take on great importance. The Lady becomes the suzerain, when she is not the first among them: the Virgin Mary, to whom the poets testify their love in the same terms and with the same passion as to the "lady below" .