On the medieval troubadour tradition

Source:  Joshua Cohen, “New Books,” in Harper’s 2012 June pp 67f:

“Before the thirteenth century,” Marisa Galvez writes in Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (U of Chicago Press), “the terms ‘poem,’ ‘poet,’ and ‘poetry,’ were reserved for classical authors.” Medieval vernacular versifiers called themselves trobadors, skilled in trobar or chantar. In relating their history, Galvez juxtaposes works such as the thirteenth-century Middle Latin / German / French / Provençal Carmina Burana, which criticized the Catholic Church, with the fourteenth-century Castilian Libro de buen amor, which delineated the joys and perils of carnality, and she interleaves pages from comedic and terpsichorean chansonniers with the comparatively dignified longings of the Liederhandschriften of the German minnesingers. The essential theme being gestured at in these pairings is the creation of authorship, though Galvez prefers to bury herself in manuscript dating rather than address an incipient Renaissance in which an artist could become the lord of his lord, and love could be both an unattainable ideal and a married Florentine named Beatrice. By favoring the collective over the individual, Songbook achieves an unintentional rhyme between cloistered monks and courtiers—whose creations still had to be inspired by and respectful of their God and their patrons, respectively—and the modern academic, whose every inkling of originality must be justified with endnotes and parenthetical equivocations. The roving minstrelsy, which Galvez regards as a medieval Creative Commons, were treated by Dante and Petrarch as a type of market research or their later pagebound poetries. From orality to textuality in two centuries flat—and still a century before the printing press typeset Virgil and Pindar and capitalized the classics into Classics.

Within that oral-to-text transition, the legendary bards said to be the originators or compilers of countless songs became themselves the heroes of songs known as vidas, or “lives.” This innovation, an early music-industry variant of the thirteenth-century Legenda sanctorum (“lives of the saints”), led to self-portraits and pitiless caricatures of rivals intended to ensure, or obliterate, the artists’ renown. Guilhem de Peitieu, Ninth Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1127), liked to boast about his “garnimen,” or sexual “equipment.” Peire d’Alvernhe, a non-noble, fairly hilarious itinerant who appears in De Vulgari Eloquentia (active in the middle of the twelfth century, he’s the earliest troubadour name-dropped—and, in The Divine Comedy, plagiarized—by Dante), wrote a dozensish song called “Cantarai d’aqestz trobadors” that condemns his peers to luteless purgatory:

I shall sing of those troubadours
who sing in many fashions, and all praise
their own verses, even the most appalling;
but they shall have to sing elsewhere,
for a hundred competing shepherds I [see],
and not one knows whether the
melody’s rising or falling.

In this Peire Rogier is guilty,
thus he shall be the first accused,
for he carries tunes of love in public right now,
and he would do better to carry
a psalter in church, or a candlestick
with a great big burning candle.

And the second: Giraut de Bornelh,
who looks like a goatskin dried out in the sun,
with that meager voice of his, and that whine,
it is the song of an old lady bearing buckets of water;
if he saw himself in a mirror,
he would think himself less than an eglantine.