As the term is a modern one, membership of the genre is subject to some disparity among scholars, but the most recent edition identifies twenty-one.
The genre's name derives from toile; that is, they are supposed to have been sung by women who were weaving,[3] and the female main characters also sew as they relate their stories.
[4] In most cases, the song begins with a brief and sympathetic history of a woman: she is either absent from her lover or married unhappily to an older nobleman and in love with a knight.
The chansons de toile are considered some of the most beautiful poems produced in Old French, and their importance was such that some of them were included in romances, in which they were sung by the heroines.
[3] The Harvard Dictionary of Music suggests that since the woman's voice in the chanson de toile is so prominent some of them may have been composed by women.