Page "Arnaut Daniel" Paragraph 2

According to one vida, Daniel was born of a noble family at the castle of Ribérac in Périgord ; however, the scant contemporary sources point to him being a jester with pernicious economic troubles.

Raimon de Durfort calls him " a student, ruined by dice and shut-the-box ".

He was the inventor of the sestina, a song of six stanzas of six lines each, with the same end words repeated in every stanza, though arranged in a different and intricate order.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow claims he was also the author of the metrical romance of Lancillotto, or Launcelot of the Lake, but this claim is completely unsubstantiated ; Dante's reference to Daniel as the author of prose di romanzi (" proses of romance ") remains, therefore, a mystery.