Recommended Books
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The “Cort d’Amor”: A Thirteenth Century Occitan Allegorical Art of Love
With the exception of the romance of Flamenca, and to a lesser extent, the Arthurian romance of Jaufre. the medieval Occitan narrative poems of the thirteenth century have attracted very little scholarly attention, and among the shorter novas, only one, the Castla-gllos by Raimon Vidal, has been published recently. No full length study of Occitan allegory has yet appeared, al though one scholar,. Marc-RenS Jung, did devote one chap te r to th is topic in a broad survey of the medieval allegorical poem: Etudes sur le poeme allégorlque en France au rao.yen age. Unfortunately, nearly all studies of medieval allegory that have appeared In the last two decades take one or another of the great epic allegories like The Romance of the Rose. The Divine Comedy, or The Canterbury Tales, as. either point of departure or point of arrival, and as a result, the ensuing source studies or definitions are inevitably distorted by the magnetic field that such masterpieces ordinarily deploy. This tendency is particularly disappointing (in view of the fact that the Occitan allegories are, for the most part, earlier than the Romance of the Rose of Guillaume de Lorris, the first of these epic allegories. For this reason, if for no other, they deserve to be considered for and .by themselves.
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The Troubadours
Combining extraordinary learning with grace of style, this volume provides the first comprehensive work in English on the poetic heritage of the medieval troubadours and the particular impact of the troubadour tradition on Italian and English verse. The songs of the troubadours with their intense lyricism “answered the mood of a feudal society newly awakened to a sense of its native uncouthness by contact with the luxury of the Orient.”
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Troubadours and Irony
From Petrarch and Dante to Pound and Eliot, the influence of the troubadours on European poetry has been profound. They have rightly stimulated a vast amount of critical writing, but the majority of modern critics see the troubadour tradition as a corpus of earnestly serious and confessional love poetry, with little or no humour. Troubadours and Irony re-examines the work offiveearly troubadours, namely Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d’Alvernha, Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, to argue that the courtly poetry of Southern France in the twelfth century was permeated with irony and that many troubadour songs were playful, laced with humorous sexual innuendo and far from serious; attention is also drawn to the large corpus of texts that are not love poems, but comic or satirical songs. New interpretations of many problematic troubadour poems are offered; in some cases the received view of a troubadour’s work is questioned. New perspectives on the tradition as a whole are suggested, and consequently on courtly culture in general. The author addresses the philological problems, by no means negligible, posed by the texts in question, and several poems are re-edited from the manuscripts.
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Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry
The medieval troubadours of the South of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is the first full-length study of the first-person subject position adopted by many of them in its relation to language and society. Using modern theoretical approaches, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a “self” or “character,” and how far it is self-determining. Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, providing many close readings and translating all medieval quotations into English. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval literature, and to anyone investigating subjectivity in lyric poetry.
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Les troubadours et les Bretons
Joseph Anglade siguec professor ena Universitat de Tolosa.
L’idée du présent travail date de plus de vingt-cinq ans..
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