Chapter Four—
Troubadours, Trouvères, and Minnesingers

Courtesy and Chivalry in the Occitan Lyric

The relationship of Occitan lyric to its society has long been problematic. For Aurelio Roncaglia, an authoritative critic, the inner inspiration of this poetry escapes definition, and it remains a matter of controversy whether one can posit a general theory of courtly love: “rather, we must recognize a complex dialectic of opposite tendencies and seek the individual place of each poet in this dialectic.”^[1] It is part of my task to underline these inner tensions in the lyric as well as in the epic and the romance. Pierre Bec, among others, has focused on such tensions in his provocative attempts to combine the literary and the sociological, the formal and the thematic: “on the level of the poem's formal construction, the values of courtesy come vigorously forth, becoming ‘semicopoetic’ centers of attraction around which a whole universe of meanings is organized, and this universe's unavoidable tensions constitute the proper dynamism of the message.”^[2] A satisfactory interpretation seems possible in terms of a collective consciousness evolved by a disparate yet cohesive group of men gravitating around the regional courts. Indeed, E. Köhler has convincingly employed a sociological schema to explain the canso's nomenclature, structure, character, and system of values (see below). Another outstanding Romanist, Alberto Vàrvaro, argues that a truly comprehensive critical method must encompass more than formal aspects, and stresses the need to integrate the formal with the referential in a sociohistorical sense in order to see the full meaning of medieval lyric and epic.^[3]

In an illuminating polemic with Roncaglia regarding the interpreta-

tion of Marcabru, Köhler criticized the “history of ideas” approach.^[4] Marcabru could not simply have been trying to solve an intellectual puzzle based on fitting together the logical pieces of different ways of loving, abstractly considered. Even while he was confronting universal questions of love and survival, he was speaking to a real social group in a particular historical situation. The conventional nature of the motifs means that the poets were not being autobiographical, and also that they spoke as members of a group, a recognized and conscious collectivity, rather than as mere individuals.

Understanding the sociocultural parameters of knighthood in its early period is a prerequisite for an interpretation of its peculiar expression in the lyric. Arno Borst (1959: 216) opened a new phase of research into this thorny question by defining knighthood as “a combination of lordship and service.” The corresponding German terms of Herrschaft and Dienst point to the two poles of a significant dialectical contrast that lies at the root of knighthood as a historical institution, and that is the underlying cause for the apparent contradictions in its literary representation and the accompanying ideology. We can begin with the words' semantic fields. French chevalier, like German rîter, ritter, simply denoted the horse-mounted man (at arms). But knights could also be called knechte, “servants,” in Middle High German, which, like the cognate English “knight,” clearly pointed to the bond of service between soldier and master. Thus, in a highly productive paradox, what was to become the paramount linguistic sign of nobility, hence freedom, started out as a mark of servitude: the knight was inherently “unfree” as a liegeman and bond-servant of a master who kept him in his pay and at his orders for military and other services.^[5] The duality of functions for the nascent status of knight, namely being servant to a feudal lord and, at the same time, member of the ruling class endowed with power and lofty privilege, lies at the root of the contradictory nature of the knight's ideology and self-expression. He is proud of his exalted position and seeks his own individual growth to full dignity in the free experience of bravery, skill, and actual personal power (sought and tested through adventures), but at the same time he acknowledges the source of his dignity and power in the court where he must serve (Arthur's, Charlemagne's, or others).

This ambiguous state is part of the personal predicament of medieval man. It is widely held that feudalism froze personal relations. Yet the feudal arrangement of society presupposed individual judgment and responsibility, since individuals were constantly reevaluating their dy-

namic relationship with neighbors and superiors, always using ideological schemas to justify practical decisions. Loyalty meant expectation of protection in exchange for service, and service could be withdrawn when no longer profitable.^[6]

Both troubadour lyric and chivalric romance are tied to the nature of their audiences—chiefly courtly. In the state of quasi-anarchy that followed the break-up of the Carolingian order, the counts saw themselves forced to shape their domains into relatively independent military entities, relying on a new class of horse-mounted soldiers to enforce their claims against their equally independent-minded vassals. Knights had to be fashioned into reliable, loyal followers through a suitable education, personal support, and enfeoffment for the worthiest. Thus the lord's house became a “court,” the home for these new dependents and helpers. Soldiers turned courtiers and, occasionally, noble knights with some feudal status of their own.

The knight's duty toward the lord developed alongside the need for self-assertion as an independent fighting warrior, since fighting was both part of service and a way to acquire one's own fief as due reward. During the lord's frequent absences, his wife acquired a special status carrying great authority: as the lord's substitute (midons < Lat. meus dominus, referring to the lady, meant “my lord”) she became the center of the court and an object of respect, even veneration, on the part of these often unmarried knights. In courtesy and courtly love service to the lady symbolically replaced the service to the real master. If the two goals of service and acquisition were inherently at odds with each other, they still constituted a unified ideology in the imaginary representation of the man who was both adventurous knight and poet in love. The ideology developed naturally over a large front, since the refined forms of civilized behavior represented by the courtois overlay were conspicuously present not only in the lyric and the romance, but also, we shall see, in the epic. The German epic did not develop out of the Carolingian French epic or as a derivation from French courtois sources, yet it contained some of the same courtly and courtois elements as the French romance, which, in turn, was ostensibly imitated in the German romance. This might be the connecting point with the earlier German courtly tradition. Courtliness and courtoisie could develop naturally and independently in different social and cultural environments, as a result of an education that stemmed from the clerics and arose from the spiritual needs of the courts.

We are not interested here in a definition of courtly love or in a dis-

cussion of its various epiphanies, in response to those who object to the term as little more than Gaston Paris's coinage (1883).^[7] Even if this term does not occur in the Middle Ages, the phenomena it is meant to cover show clear distinguishing marks from all other forms of sensual love: it should suffice here to say that, in A. J. Denomy's phrasing (1953: 44), courtly love distinguished itself in “its purpose or motive, its formal object, namely, the lover's progress and growth in natural goodness, merit, and worth.”

Despite repeated assurances of total, unending dedication, the lover's relationship to the lady remains unstable and ambiguous. Hence the puzzling changes of mind, like Walther von der Vogelweide's eloquent “challenge to courtly love.” In Bernart de Ventadorn's canso “Lo tems vai e ven e vire,” one of his famous expressions of incipient, yet repented, revolt against the intolerable demands of fin'amor, we find an early revelation of the inner contradictions of the psyche. After declaring his intention to turn elsewhere, Bernart eventually reiterates his devotion: his “vengut er al partimen” (I shall come to the parting of ways, v. 35) is closely followed (v. 43) by “ja no.m partrai a ma vida” (never in my life shall I leave her).^[8]

The chivalrous code of courtesy became one of respect for the woman and concern for others' needs and feelings, hence for good manners in public behavior. Such a code could not arise by itself from the lords, who neither needed it nor really practiced it, but who in the end gladly adopted it from their subordinates for the sake of order and, as it were, a feeling of comradeship within the comital household. In adopting it, the lords implicitly yielded to a sort of ideological blackmail. In what Leo Spitzer called the paradoxe amoureux of troubadour poetry, we see mirrored the lesser nobility's effort to integrate itself into the higher nobility, an effort which the latter accepted by historical necessity and managed to control.^[9] This effort toward self-legitimization (the proclaimed loyalty, leialtat, etymologically implied legality, legalitas ) embraced a diverse group of court-dwellers who found this ideology to their common interest. Loyalty was a companion of fe or fes, faithfulness.

Courtesy implied a self-restraint that was essential to the knights' survival. Mezura became a key principle of cohabitation, entailing recognition of the limits beyond which one could not go. By its inner logic the court also became the natural place for an art of loving, whose object was the domina/domna, superior by definition and unreachable,

yet desired by all.^[10] Obviously mansuetude and humility (umildat ) were a necessary marker of recognition of the lady's absolute superiority as well as the lover/courtier's readiness to be obedient in all (obediensa ) in order to qualify as fis, a dedicated “faithful of Love”—his loyalty going more to the God of Love than to an individual lord or lady.^[11]

The convention of this erotic relationship caused keen competition among “lovers,” each of whom naturally saw in all others nothing but unworthy rivals to be exposed and denigrated. The term lauzengiers covers all other lovers in the audience, denounced as envious and insincere flatterers. The husband, that is, the lord, accepts this chaste devotion toward his wife and is often reminded not to take on the ridiculous role of gilos, “the jealous one.” He is also reminded that he must reward his vassal's devotion with generous gifts—possibly land, immunities, and positions of power in the household and the domain—this reward being the real, material one adumbrated in the request for merce (Fr. guerdon ) from the lady. The expectation of a benefice was part of the appeal to dreitz, the cardinal virtue of justice the lover proclaimed about himself and demanded of the lord.

Within the literature we are examining, different codes coexist in a state of mutual tension, the contradiction or ambiguity being a source of human and poetic richness. The application of the feudal relationship of lord and vassal to the relationship between lovers, the man becoming, in all humility, the servant, carried with it a high degree of playful ambiguity. Another factor of ambiguity was the introduction of the Christian ideology of mystic love, represented at best by the Marian cult, which became bent to profane love. Ever since it was first postulated by the French literary historian P.-L. Ginguené, it has been argued whether the Marian cult influenced courtly love or, on the contrary, it was in part a by-product of the new literary cult of womanhood. Such complexity is part of the fascination medieval literature exerts to this day, since the tension between contradictory moods results from a degree of (Christian) interiorization that ancient man could not experience.

Eduard Wechssler's and Joachim Bumke's older thesis of the nobleman becoming knight, Ritter (Bumke, Studien zum Ritterbegriff ), has been brought into sharper focus by Duby's and Köhler's distinction between the “young” (jove ) knight—poor, landless, and even non-casé or homeless, hence dependent on the powerful lord as his servant—and the “old” lord he serves but tries to bend to his vital interests. Jean Frappier's “culture du désir érotique freiné et prolongé” (“Vues  . . . ”:

140) is in harmony with Duby's and Köhler's abstraction of the troubadours' code, with a view of the high nobility being “educated” by the low “nobility of spirit,” soldiers of fortune of humble origin and cadets of the smaller nobility.

During the early stages, it seems reasonable to assume a coming together of the clerical educational ideals with the needs of the poor knights' class. Thus the Jaeger and the Duby/Köhler theses can be joined to fill each other's gaps. The former did not explain the survival of the curial mentalité after the end of the imperial bishoprics; the latter did not ask, let alone answer, why the poor knights developed an ideology that reproduced so much of the language and ethos of the curiales. Taken together, the two views help to explain how this unique ideology (absurd, for example, when seen in isolation in Petrarca) could acquire so much vitality as to survive almost intact for several centuries, especially through the realistic and skeptical experiences of the Cinquecento. To this outstanding example of the enduring character of aesthetic forms and themes one could apply György Lukács's argument that, beyond mere sociological relativism or determinism, the superstructure has a dynamic life of its own: as reflection or mirroring of a past reality it can live on in the collective memory for the pleasure of recalling the past.

The ideology of courtly love can be seen as part of a process of social climbing, the poor knights behaving as “marginal men” who sought recognition by the upper social stratum in order to overcome the limitations of the stratum they were trying to leave behind. A more aggressive posture could make the lords the butt of impatient courtiers, who criticized them as the “evil rich” (rics malvatz ), incapable of true love because they were married (molheratz ), illiberal, lustful, part of the different, inferior “others.” Logical and necessary by the very nature of the ideology, these insults risked becoming counterproductive, since the desired advancement depended on the lords' good will. Yet, overlooking such occasional side effects, the lords welcomed the ideology and even joined it because it ensured the knights' loyalty, which the lords needed. A sort of compromise ensued. Some court poets, like Marcabru, remained skeptical and hostile. But some lords, like Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Eble de Ventadorn (whose “school” Marcabru vocally opposed), professed a strain of courtly love, the elitist and exclusive hermetic style of the trobar clus, that implicitly gave them a position of leadership. All this developed only among the second generation of Provençal lyricists:

Guilhelm IX (1071–1127) was the first troubadour only in that he started the lyrical tradition, but without spiritual connection with chivalrous ideology.^[12]

Our sociological perspective may be a good way to tackle the difficult problem of the trobar clus. The gaps written in that style often boast of the poet's cunning in defeating the “folly,” foldats, of “the others” (be these the rivals, the inferiors, or even the lords). It was an interesting bending of the curial quality of shrewdness for the sake of survival in the treacherous environment of the courts. A revealing document of the trobar clus is the tenso “Ara.m plaitz, Giraut de Borneill” between Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Guiraut de Bornelh (variously dated at 1168, 1170, or 1171).^[13] For Raimbaut, the grand seigneur, the trobar clus was a distinctive mark of the aristocrat and a way to keep the message of this lofty poetry within the close circle of the worthy. Guiraut objected that he aimed more at universal appreciation (“qu'es mais amatz / e plus presatz / qui'l fa levet e venarsal,” “it is more loved and better appreciated if you make it easy and of universal appeal,” vv. 12 f.). Elsewhere he contended that the easy style is easy only in appearance, since it results from mastering the difficult art of being comprehensible to the largest possible public (including the populace gathering around the common spring) even while expressing high universal truths, occasionally sublime ones.^[14] Furthermore, clarity and ease of style are the result of happiness in love. Dante was to share that position. It was, after all, the classical principle that hidden art is the best art and that the achievement lies in what Boileau would term l'art caché, and the late eighteenth-century German classicists, überwundene Schwierigkeit, to wit, in overcoming the resistance of the medium, the linguistic difficulty. Raimbaut, however, was expressing the exclusiveness of the true lord who might also want to distance himself from the common jongleurs and the rabble of the court, not to mention the commoners outside.^[15] On their part, the troubadours were all the more interested in keeping the lords from monopolizing, or claiming any special rights over, the style and ideological canons that the lords had adopted but not invented."

With succeeding generations of troubadours, the courts increased in importance as they became the only locus for the poor, landless, and homeless knights. Courtesy was the common bond because of common interests (keeping harmony in the familia ). As, with time, grants of land and property became less likely, reputation and honor (pretz and onor )

no longer depended on property but on public recognition of this ideal of inner perfection. The critique of power and property, noble or bourgeois as the poets might be, was founded on this perception of a superior nobility of spirit.

The virtues invoked in the poems often betray the economic and social background of the ethical ideology, and this is probably nowhere as clear as in Marcabru, who introduces us to the haunting presences of largueza as the virtue of the generous and just lord deserving to be loyally served, its opposite vice being escarsedat, avoleza, or avareza (stinginess from avarice, Lat. avaritia ). For all their transparent economic layers, these concepts embed the poet's implicit theology and metaphysics.^[16] Above all, escarsedat is almost synonymous with malvestat, supreme wickedness and worthlessness, and the ubiquitous enemy of proeza, which in turn is made almost equivalent to largueza. Another undesirable type is the lady's guardian (gardador ), appointed by the lord to make sure that knights do not get dangerously close to his wife. Such guardians might be domestic clerics, acting somewhat in the capacity of the eunuchs of Muslim harems, but the troubadours (like Marcabru and Bernart de Ventadorn) are not impressed with their reliability and accuse them of repaying the trust with treachery, even to the point of giving the lord bastard offspring—one cause of moral and racial degeneracy within the nobility. The troubadours saw such guardians as undeserving favorites who got the merce, both sexual and material, that was their own due. It was all part of the relationship between knight poets and clerics, as the poets, from Marcabru to Peire Cardenal, burdened the clergy with the critiques that were more generally aimed at the degeneracy of the Church as a whole, even though the clerics were partly responsible for the civilizing process of courtly education.^[17]

The coexistence of variant codes could become outright juxtaposition to be expressed in a specific literary form, such as the descort, which is found in Provence, northern France, Germany, and Italy (discordo, contrasto ) as well. For a telling example, compare the trouvère Colin Muset's (fl. 1230) “Quant voi lo douz tens repairier,”^[18] where, as is typical of this form, the metrical difference between the strophes is meant to express the inner “discord” in the heart of the lover, his inharmonious experience of different manners of emotional involvement, constantly swinging between exaltation and alienation. This was formally analogous to Dante's expression of Pier della Vigna's inner moral discord by adopting his tortuous rhetorical style (Inferno 13).

The literary form of the troubadours' compositions reflects the love

situation in a way that joins poetics, economics, and social ethics. The structure of the canso corresponds to the set social relationship.^[19] Of the customary five or six stanzas, the first usually states the poet's intention, framing it in a natural setting of time and place. The second develops the poet's state of mind. The third, the central one, puts forth the praise of the lady, while the fourth stanza often inveighs against the lauzengiers, warning the lady against them. What follows may develop the same motifs or warn of changes of mind or tactics if the lover's worth is not recognized (and the knight's valor is not rewarded by the lord). The envoi usually addresses itself directly to the lady, a protector, or the lord himself. Lover, beloved, and rivals thus fill the roles of types, but in the society of the poet/knight they are, rather than simply literary conventions, real antagonists in the flesh. This analysis of the correspondence between metrical form and message exemplifies the aesthetic potential inherent in a sociological reading. Sociological criticism does not exhaust literary criticism and is only occasionally capable of investing the poetic/aesthetic level of the texts, but this is also true of most other now-current methods.

With all its repetitiveness and generic abstractness, the literary/ethical framework we have been confronting expresses the poet's feeling as a member of his society, and his style, conventional and generic as it is, adequately expresses his adherence to that society and his functioning within it. To borrow Reto R. Bezzola's sensible explanation of the peculiar nature of Occitan lyric, “le style qu'il adopte, auquel il se soumet sans en sentir la contrainte, est l'expression de cet organisme [i.e., that society].”^[20] Since this literature, like most of medieval literature, was chiefly transmitted orally, the relative impersonality of oral transmission—when the message was basically repeated from memory—imposed a large degree of collectivity and “conventionality.”^[21]

So, courtly literature had motives. It had an ideological finality to define and clarify the values of the chivalric class. The socioeconomic basis for the noble life was clearly implied. The German terms are picturesquely effective by their internal rhyme. A knight was said to need not only the proper spirit, muot, but also the material means, guot, since he could not be generous and liberal without having anything to give: see Hartmann, Erec: 2263–2265; Gregorius: 606–620; Iwein: 2905–2908; and Gottfried, Tristan: 5648–5712. Knightly virtues are often listed pithily but emphatically by the troubadours. One detects an interesting “southern moral realism”: contrary to the perfectionism that will be evident in the French romances with their images of ideal

knights, the troubadours are often aware that their possibilities are limited, and thus, since not all virtues are attainable by one individual, only he who is deprived of all courtly virtues is unworthy of knighthood. Arnaut de Maruelh (fl. 1171–1190) expresses in precise terms this moral relativism.^[22] With their unending pleas for liberality on the part of their lords, the troubadours echoed either the hurt feelings of decayed noblemen yearning for their lost “rights,” or the hopes for ascendance on the part of the poor landless nobility. Putting to use both sides of the coin, nobility was, alternatively, claimed either as a birthright or as a matter of personal worth. Consciousness of the changes that were taking place in the first half of the thirteenth century is evident, for example, in the troubadour Folquet de Romans's reference to his contemporary Frederick II, who abandoned his characteristic liberality, reduced his courtiers to bureaucratic functionaries (around 1221), and kept all the land and money for himself: in particular, his southern court came to favor ministerial poets over professional minstrels.^[23]

On the economic plane largueza is true virtue, as avareza is the mother of all vices. But a degree of bourgeois rationality gradually intervenes in the debates on liberality among the late troubadours. The partimen between Albert de Sisteron (Albertet de Sestaro) and Peire (Raimon?) contrasts Albert's improvident knight who dissipates his patrimony to win his lady with Peire's reasonable and constant knight who wins the true esteem of his lady and of society by spending advisedly, as a warranty of future ability to support her. Similarly, and most eloquently, Sordello:

Quar per larguesa amesurada
anc nulz oms larcs non pres baisada,
mas per larguesa franca e folla
destrui.l seu e son pretz afolla.
.      .     .    .    .   .    .    .    .    .    .
Per qu'om deu, qui tot vol salvar,
per la mediana via anar.

(By a measured liberality no liberal man ever lowered his status, whereas by excessive and foolish prodigality a man destroys his patrimony and loses his reputation . . . . He who wants to save everything must keep the middle way.)^[24]

The accent is, then, on mesura, via mediana, to avoid folhor, foldat, “folly.” The dangers of prodigality had appeared in the earlier troubadours, though not the earliest ones. Guiraut de Bornelh says that no lord was ruined by giving too much, yet he could appreciate that foolish

liberality can cause problems.^[25] Italian sources speak of the Este family almost ruining itself for excessive liberality, and of a Malaspina having to turn to highway robbery to keep up his “giving” (donare ).^[26]

On the moral plane, Guiraut de Bornelh voiced an idealistic concern for the reputation of the chivalric estate when he criticized the abuse of power by knights who turn freebooters instead of using military service for legitimate causes. In his sirventes “Per solatz revelhar” we read:

  You saw tourneys proclaimed,
with well-equipped gentry attending,
and then, for a time, you heard
talk of those who fought best;
now there is honor in robbing
and snatching sheep from the flock.
Shame to the knight
who dares court a lady
after touching bleating sheep with his hands
or robbing churches and travelers.^[27]  

On the sentimental plane, the rule is not really love as we would understand it, but desire, an unfulfillable desire that is the root and source of unlimited perfectibility—somewhat like the romantic German Sehnsucht. Unsatisfied desire frustrates but also gives the lover the true nobility to which he aspires.^[28] Satisfaction might not end the infatuation, but would end the progress toward ever increasing perfection. In the course of the thirteenth century, with the weakening of the social structures that had supported the ideology and literature of chivalry and courtly love, the expression of concrete social situations gave way to more universal and abstract schemata, referentiality being turned to broader groups and becoming more collective, as best witnessed in the German and Italian courtly lyric. The fact that political and social changes emptied the courtly motifs of their precise meaning did not make them mere formal conventions. Theme became style, as it did, conclusively, in Petrarca, with a mood of intense spirituality that was no longer socially bound. Hence, the need for allegory and symbolism, as in Ulrich von Lichtenstein and Burkhard von Hohenfels, in lieu of social definitions, however shifting, tense, and dialectically qualified they might have been.^[29]

Yet the social milieu that can be identified as the chief producer and consumer, voice and audience of courtly literature, may appear too narrow for the breadth and scope of the rich poetry that is before us.^[30] The attitudes that inspired such diverse writers as the Provençal

minstrels, the French vagrant goliards, the Sicilian, Bolognese, and Tuscan notaries, and then Dante, Petrarca, and their cosmopolitan imitators of several countries for generations to come, shared something that went beyond their social station, origin, or function. From a functional “ideology” or mentalité it became an abstract one, all the more powerful and lasting.^[31] Consequently, the debate on their “conventionality” or sincerity somehow misses the mark, precisely because we are dealing with an ideology rather than with personal sentiments. Understanding chivalry and courtliness as ideological phenomena places them in a clearer light than a simply social or political explanation ever could.

What the more exalted troubadours show is a state of mind that transcended and even denied the values of feudalism: their newly found sen, “wisdom” or “knowledge,” their gai saber, “gay learning,” became opposed to the warriorlike ardimen, “courage” and “bravery” (Fr. hardiment, G. Tapferkeit, Lat. fortitudo ), and proeza (Fr. proece ) of the feudal vassal and the knight. Whereas physical strength is born with us, our wisdom and knowledge are acquired, like the erudition of the clerical courtier.^[32] Thus, gradually, as the feudal order started weakening, the themes also shifted in relative emphasis, undermining the original ethical system from within and moving from the cavalaria of the loving knight to courtly love without the warrior virtues. The knight's military qualities had been set off against the courtly qualities as valuable assets for winning ladies' favors, but later they began to lose the argument as less important. As we shall see, in the quasi-epic setting of the French and German romances it was the other way around: Erec and Yvain had to leave their ladies to prove their worth by a series of victorious knightly deeds. But in a partimen between Guionet (Gui de Cavaillon?) and Raembaut (Raimbaut de Vaqueiras?),^[33] Raembaut decides that “Cel q'es adregz, plazenz, de bel estatge, / lares e cortes e senes villania,” “he who is correct, pleasing, of good manners, liberal and courtly and without any boorishness,” is worth a hundred times more to his lady than the one who has ardimen, because it is not right that for one virtue alone one should possess a good lady. In another partimen, already mentioned, between Albert de Sisteron and Peire, the latter insinuates with a delightfully ironic touch of bourgeois common sense that military adventure is a dangerous way to win a lady. Better to have the lady without the battle; better to be courtly than to have been brave. A dead emperor is not worth very much.^[34] So courtesy could now even dispense with heroic prowess. Originally proeza had meant military valor, as in Guilhelm IX; it was now becoming synonymous

with cortesia even without ardimen. At the extreme end of such arguments, boorish ardimen could become an obstacle to the cortesia demanded by love, and even a cause of downright vilania when deprived of wisdom and culture (sen ). Sen was originally distinguished from saber or clerical doctrine, shunned by the knight as pedantic bigotry (the Germans called it pfaffisch ), but this distinction later disappeared.

We must therefore pause to ask ourselves whether we may not have to go back to where we started, since the basic meaning of this poetic school still eludes us. For one more paradox keeps staring at us: if these poems express and represent the poets' longing for recognition and reward, they keep saying that they do not attain either. We are then left wondering, as contemporary audiences might have, what is the point of iterating, poem after poem, poet after poet, indeed, from country to country, generation after generation, a message that was familiar before it was restated? It amounted to saying: “I want what I cannot get, I need what I will lack, I ask what must be denied.” We are confronted with a poetry that appears conventional because it “expresses” what does not individually and personally “inspire” the poet—to use Várvaro's appropriate distinction.^[35] The answer could be, this time, that the sociological interpretation must be integrated with the analysis of the forms, as practiced by formalist criticism, to conclude that the peculiar nature of this literature lies precisely in its being, conjointly, a verbal game aimed at the pleasure of listening to itself, as a beautiful courtly show, even while it creates by its message and forms the concrete life and practical salvation of the courtier-poet.^[36] This poetry became an integral part of court ritual not in a trivial sense, but as a high-level expression of cultural and social refinement that operated as a cohesive and stabilizing factor within the individual courts and through a vast cosmopolitan network, thanks to the poets/minstrels' errancy.

We can thus answer the challenges of, say, a Roncaglia about the ambiguity and mystery of troubadour poetry as well as Zumthor's insistence on their “verbal play.” Mutatis mutandis, we can apply to this kind of poetry (of “praise of the lady”) the peculiar predicament that Stanley Fish (1988: 239) has recently extracted from Ben Jonson's poems of praise, read as an involved strategy for dealing with his ambivalent relationship to court life: “a Jonson poem always has the problem of finding something to say, a problem that is solved characteristically when it becomes itself the subject of the poem, which is then enabled at once to have a mode of being (to get written) and to remain empty of representation.”

Great master of “the boast” (gab ), his favorite genre, Peire Vidal (fl. 1180–1206) undoubtedly offers the most brilliant performance in the jocular mode of miles ludens, playing on the juxtaposition or mixture of heroic and courtly.^[37] Even his vidas are a fine texture of his own ironic boasts as an outrageously successful warring knight and lover. More generally, the element of playfulness in courtois poetry is an extension of the games of courtly elegance. Such playfulness generated a high degree of casuistry in the subtle intellectual debates on conventional and abstract “cases of love,” especially in the genres of partimen and tenso.^[38] The chief intent of these debates may be implied in the fact that the decisions usually point to the harder one of the available choices, thus attesting to the principle of fin'amor as an educational process that elevates and refines the lover, spiritually, morally, and socially.^[39] The highest goal is onor, a public, social recognition of true worth. Since, as Köhler has underlined, the term onor originally meant fief, this social and moral honor was a sublimated substitute for feudal benefices.^[40]

To conclude, let us look at the exemplary portrait of the Young King as a paragon of knighthood in Bertran de Born's planh “Mon chan fenis ab dol et ab maltraire” (Pillet-Carstens 80.26—hereafter P.-C.). He was “larc e gen parlan / e gen cavalgan, / de bella faiso / e d'umil senblan / per far grans honors” (generous, noble in speech, apt on horseback, of graceful person and humble in his way of distributing great honors, vv. 5–9). He was “reis dels cortes e dels pros emperaire” (king of the courtly and emperor of the brave, 15). Hence he justly received the name of Young King, since he was the guide and father to all who were truly young: “que ‘reis joves’ aviaz nom agut / e de joven eras capdels e paire,” 17 f. He was the embodiment of joy and love (“jois et amors,” 23); he received his courtiers gently and generously in word and deed: “Gent acuillir e donar ses cor vaire / e bel respos e ‘ben-sias-vengut!’ / e gran hostal pagat e gen tengut / dons e garnirs et estar ses tort faire,” 29–32.^[41] Note the central position of joi, “joy of living.” It went together with the other key term of solas (solaz, sollatz, OFr. soulas, “pleasant company” < Lat. solatium ): court life demanded to be textured with good disposition and graced with good company. Ordericus Vitalis had said of Guilhelm IX that he had surpassed the gayest minstrels in gaity, using that term facetus that we have seen applied to the life of the courts as a curial virtue (facetos etiam histriones facetiis superans ).^[42]

The French Trouvères

As we leave the Occitan area we note the widespread similarity of literary expressions, which involves the immediate diffusion of Occitan themes and formal motifs, with minimal original variations in the contiguous French area. I shall restrict myself to a sampling of expressive devices in northern France, in and out of the lyric. The more distant geographic areas of Germany and Italy will yield broader basic divergences reflecting the different social situations. I shall specifically dwell on samples of formal motifs because their quick and early crystallization manifests the depth of penetration of themes that we have assumed were originally socially-bound.

Alongside the moral predicates,the ideology of courtly love also embodied the topoi inherited from ancient psychology and physiology, transformed into the metaphors of humors and spirits, which could take on a life of their own. The Italian Dolce Stil Nuovo is known for its use of the various spiritelli that stood for emotions and dispositions, but even earlier one could find personifications of parts of the psyche that became separable from the individual. These topical personifications were functional in representing the lover's alienation and his drastic inner conflict. Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. 1150–1180), for example, displayed the ideological framework of Neo-Platonic love in the sophism of the heart and sould leaving the lover. See his canso “Tant ai mo cor ple de joya” (P.-C. 70.44, st. 3 vv. 33–36): “Mo cor ai pres d'Amor, / que l'esperitz lai cor, / mas lo cors es sai, alhor, / lonh de leis, en Fransa” (I have my heart close to Love, and my spirit also runs there,but my body is here, in another place, far away from her, in France).^[43] He ends his long canso “Lancan vei la folha” with this envoy: “Domna, mo coratge, / .1 melhor amic qu'eu ai, / vos man en ostatge / entro qu'eu torn de sai” (Lady, I am sending you my heart, the best friend I have, as hostage until I return from here).^[44]

Similarly, in his poem “Merci clamans de mon fol errement,” Le Châtelain de Coucy (d. 1203) had the following: “Et quant mon cors li toil, mon cuer li rant” (When I take my body away from her, I return my heart to her). For an example from Chrétien's own region of Champagne, the trouvère Gace Brulé (fl. 1180–1213) has literally lost his heart (to the lady): “S'ele ne m'en crois, viegne i guarder; / Vez, n.en a mie dedenz mi!” (If she does not believe me, let her come and look: see, there is none inside me!)^[45] In his “Ahi Amour! com dure departie,” the

French trouvère Conon de Béthune (ca. 1150–1219 or 1220), on the verge of leaving for the Crusade, protests that he is not departing from his beloved at all, since he leaves his heart with her: “Las! c'ai jou dit? Ja ne m'en part jou mie! / Se li cors vait servir nostre Seignour, / li cuers remaint dou tout en sa baillie.”^[46] Compare, too, Thibaut de Champagne's (1201–1253) famous poem “Ausi comme unicorne sui”: “mes cuers aloit si tressaillant / qu'il vous remest, quand je m'en mui” (my heart was startled so, that it remained with you when I moved away).^[47] Shades of Marsilio Ficino!

For even earlier cases of this striking metaphorical way to represent inner conflict we can turn to Chrétien's Chevalier de la charrete. Guenièvre (Guinevere), just saved by Lancelot from a frightening imprisonment, withdraws into a chamber and refuses to speak to her dumbfounded lover. He is said to follow her with his eyes as far as they can go, but “while his eyes remain outside with his body, his heart is able to go further” (vv. 4000 f.). More explicitly still, Lancelot “left but his heart stayed with Guenièvre” (v. 4700).^[48] This clearly shows how the casuistry of love first introduced by the troubadours found parallels not only among their imitators in the lyric but in the other courtly genres, too, and also beyond France. Themes and motifs went together with corresponding stylistic devices. The specific motif we are momentarily pursuing shows that here, too, German poets were not far behind. Gottfried of Strassburg, for one, excelled in the exploitation of this stylistic/ideological mannerism. We may recall Isolt's lengthy monologue when Tristan leaves for a long absence in France: see verses 18,491–600, especially the motif of “the soul in the other” at 18,510 f.: “daz ir min leben vüeret hin / und lazet mir daz iuwer hie” (And you have taken my life along and left your life behind with me). The most striking episode of all is probably the humorous and surprising debate between Hartmann von Aue and Lady Love in Hartmann's Iwein (vv. 2971–3028). The motif was already in Hartmann's source, Chrétien's Yvain (vv. 2639 f.), but simply as the metaphor that Yvain had left his heart behind with his wife, and that it was a wonder how the body could go on living without it. Hartmann turned this into a major argument and, furthermore, in developing the theme there and elsewhere, he always made the exchange mutual: see Erec 2364–2367 and Gregorius 653 f.^[49]

In an analogous vein, within the scope of expressing the contradictions of the lover's predicament, the rhetoric of courtly love developed a set of conventions that could be played as a game—part of what was

then perceived as civilized refinement, the style of the élite man. A sort of initiation ritual imposed a language of seeming irrationality that combined endlessly, in elegant and witty paradox, contradictory positions of love and hate, hope and despair, happiness and sorrow. Petrarca turned all this into an enduring style of oxymora that had a serious side (the discovery of the contradictory nature of the psyche). Admittedly his early ancestors included, beyond the Provençal troubadours and the French trouvères, Ovid's odi et amo and Augustine's video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. But Petrarca's mark on posterity was part of a general phenomenon involving the drift from live social issues toward set style forms, which eventually led to mannerisms of all sorts: an arsenal of motifs to be used as literary play and social conventions.

In “Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis,” Cercamon (fl. 1137–1152) said he was pleased when his lady made him mad, when she made a complete fool of him, when she laughed at him. He thoroughly enjoyed being full of worries for her sake, and it was up to her to make him faithful or full of tricks, a rustic peasant or a most refined courtier, and so on: “Bel m'es quant ilh m'enfolhetis / e.m fai badar e.n vau muzan; / et leis m'es bel si m'escarnis. /  . . . . / Totz cossiros m'en esjauzis, / o drechuriers o ples d'enjan,/ o totz vilas o totz cortes.”^[50] In his canso “Non es meravelha s'eu chan,” Bernart de Ventadorn had it thus: “A hundred times a day I die of grief, and I revive of joy a hundred times. My disease has a wonderful appearance, for my pain is worth more than any other good,” “cen vetz mor lo jorn de dolor / e reviu de joi autras cen. / Ben es mos mals de bel semblan, / que mais val mos mals qu'autre bes.”^[51]

For exemplary cases among the trouvères, compare Blondel de Nesle's (second half of the twelfth century) heaping of oxymora in quick succession: “plaisant martire,” “a pleasant martyrdom,” “douce mort,” “a sweet death,” “qu'en ceste amour m'est li tourmenz delis,” “in this love of mine my torment is a delight” (“Mout se feïst bon tenir de chanter”). The obvious stylistic playfulness does not exclude seriousness of purpose. In Le Châtelain de Coucy's “Li nouviauz tanz” we read: “Tanc con fui miens, ne me fist se bien non, / mes or sui suenz, si m'ocit sanz raison; / et c'est pour ce que de cuer l'ai amee!” (As long as I was my own man, she did me nothing but good; But now that I am hers, she kills me without reason; This because I have loved her truly, with all my heart.) Gace Brulè says he wants what harms him most, and dismay makes him rejoice and laugh: “quant je plus vueil ce dont plus sui grevez, / et en l'esmai m'estuet joer et rire” (“Ire d'amors qui en mon

cuer repere,” vv. 38 f.). Also compare Conon de Béthune's “L'an que rose ne fueille”: “einsi me fait vivre melleement / d'ire et de bien” (thus she makes me live in a confusion of grief and joy). Finally, in “Chançon ferais, que talenz m'en est pris,” Thibaut de Champagne raves so: “Dame, por vos vueil aler foloiant / que je en aim mes maus et ma dolor, /  . . .. que mes granz maus por vos si fort m'agree.” (Lady, for you I want to go around like a fool, for I love the grief and pain I have from you,  . . . my great suffering for you pleases me so!)

There is another side to this typical and productive use of antithesis, which in its apparent play of unreality expresses the very predicament of the illusory woman represented and invoked in the lyric. The convention was there from the very beginning, and remained canonical even through the various forms of Petrarchism. For the earliest testimony, see Guilhelm IX: “Amigu'ai ieu, no sai qui s'es, / qu'anc non la vi . . . . / ni'm fes que'm plassa ni que'm pes, / ni no m'en cau . . . . / Anc non la vi et am la fort.” (I have a lady friend but I don't know who she is, since I've never seen her, nor has she done to me anything either pleasing or displeasing, and I couldn't care less . . . . I've never seen her yet I love her heartily.)^[52] The lady may be, but does not have to be, a person: she can be the lover's other self, his better, spiritual self, his ideal of inner perfection, his mirror image—Narcissus.^[53] In other words, in the specific context we are studying, the woman was the knight's chivalric and courteous self.

This possibility is an aspect of the unreality of the woman's presence in medieval literature, even while she is, conversely, the center of attention of much of the literary and artistic discourse. The apparent paradox results from woman having been symbolically invested with functions that did not literally belong to her—like being the real lord—or that were hers on a purely anthropological level—as, typically, in the common phenomenon of equivalence between biological sex and grammatical gender, in bono et in malo: woman as the Church (Ecclesia ), Wisdom (Sophia, Sapientia, Philosophia ), lust (luxuria ), and so on.^[54] It it also part of what made courtly love so exemplary and durable, namely a radical crystallization of that biological/anthropological phenomenon defined by Mircea Eliade as (Platonic) “androgynization,” meaning that in love “chaque sexe acquiert, conquiert les ‘qualités’ du sexe opposé (la grace, la soumission, Ie dévouement acquis par I'homme amoureux, etc.).”^[55] We have a revealing testimony to this phenomenon in the fact that the list of virtues attributed to the courtly woman is more or less

the same as for the man: she is supposed to be doussa, bela, genta, fina, and endowed with cortezia, pretz, sabers, and umildat.

The German Minnesang

On German soil, too, the courtois ethos spilled over into several genres. The virtue of wisdom in the form of modesty or moderation, for example, is in the very title of a popular collection of proverbial sentences or “Sprüche, ” namely Freidank's Bescheidenheit of circa 1230. But it is in the lyric and the romance that we find the most fertile ground for our inquiry.

The Minnesingers were a good match for their Occitan and French peers. The most extended display of obedience at any cost had been, of course, Chrétien's Lancelot, who began by accepting dishonor when he jumped in the condemned man's chariot (and yet would later be spurned by Guenièvre for having hesitated “two steps”), and then carried on in that humiliating predicament until he outdid himself by fighting “cowardly” in the tourney at Noauz, always for the sake of Gueniévre and at her instigation. In lyrical form, after Cercamon (remember the passage quoted above from “Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis”), the Austrian master Reinmar der Alte (1150/1160, d. before 1210, believed to be the poet praised by Gottfried as “the nightingale of Hagenau”) set up the most radical standard of total mansuetudo vis-à-vis a mistress who behaved as a cruel tyrant:

Of one thing only and no other do I want to be a master as long as I live: I want the whole world to give me praise for having the skill to endure suffering better than anyone. A woman is the cause of this state of mine, whereby I cannot remain silent day or night. But I have such a gentle disposition that I take her hate as joy. Yet, alas, how much it hurts!^[56]

Compare, furthermore, Reinmar's “waz tuon ich, daz mir liebet daz mir leiden solte?” (What am I doing, drawing pleasure from what ought to pain me?, from “Der lange süeze kumber mîn.”) It is particularly significant that such expressions of service to the lady could be voiced by high lords, like the powerful Swiss count Rudolf von Fenis-Neuenburg: “Iemer mêre wil ich dienen mit staete” (I am determined to serve always with constancy).^[57] It is an example of the adoption of the nonfree knights' and ministeriales' ethic of service on the part of the lords who did not need it for survival but were conquered by the image of moral nobility it had projected.

The Minnesingers could go beyond the merely psychological representation of the contradictory nature of strong emotional states: they could use stylistic devices as fitting vehicles to express the conflicts between the competing ideologies that surrounded them. Walther von der Vogelweide is second to none in dramatically shifting between hohe and nidere Minne. His master Reinmar had said that if his lady died he could no longer go on living (“stirbet si, sô bin ich tôt”). Retorts Walther, wittily yet seriously: If he dies she is as good as dead too, since she has received her true life and glory from being loved and sung by him: “ir leben hât mînes lebennes êre; / stirbe ab ich, sô ist si tôt.”^[58] Perhaps even more eloquent is his famous stanza of revolt against Reinmar's unswerving devotion to a lady who is the perfect object of high love, while Walther sets side by side the distant, unreal lady of hohe Minne and the real, full-blooded, and truly human women he now thinks he can love: “Wîp muoz iemer sîn der wîbe hôhste name / und tiuret baz danne frowe, als ichz erkenne.” (Woman will always be the highest name of women, / and is higher praise than lady, I now hold.)^[59]

Close as it remained, all in all, to the troubadour lyric, the Minnesang also showed marked differences from it.^[60] The absence of the concept of joven, “youth,” and joi in the exalted comprehensive sense it had in southern France—Middle High German vröide (G. Freude) is more neutral—reflected a different social situation and resulted in the absence of certain literary forms. The fact that German courts were configured with a predominance of ministeriales over knights of lineage, imposed a greater respect for the lords and less polemical spirit against them, since the often non-free ministeriales, who did not enjoy any mobility, tended to accept their given status. Even a knight of lineage like Walther von der Vogelweide, with all his restlessness, was compelled to place werdekeit, “value,” in a sense of mâze, “measure,” that was equivalent to “loyal” acceptance of one's “stable status” (staete ): see his famous poem “Aller Werdekeit ein füegerinne” to Lady Moderation, Vrouwe Mâze, where he says: “So bîn ich doch, swie nieder ich sî, der werden ein, / genuog in mîner mâze hô” (However low my status is, I still am, with regard to my worth, high enough within my status).^[61]

The traditional explanation has been that the Minnesang was the creation of the higher nobility, hence not possibly polemical against it, but once again, as with regard to the origins of troubadour poetry, this hypothesis is contradicted by documented fact. The reason for the difference is the greater stability of court life and family relations as well as the infrequency of knights errant (vagantes ) in German lands. Hence

senhals, the pseudonyms for the beloved, or the practice of “ladies of the screen,” as seen in Italy, including Dante's Vita nuova, were also not needed: they would simply have made the husbands unnecessarily suspicious. Likewise, the Minnesingers were not inclined to break a spear in favor of inner nobility, nor were they so much interested in combating jealousy: the married lord's trust in his wife was his own business and the German courtier was not about to advise him on how to deal with it. They were content to emphasize envy, nît.^[62]

Accepting one's state, however, poses another paradox in the practice of courtiership and courtly love, since staying put is not only unproductive, but defeats the very premise of the knight's progress: as courtier or lover he must either aspire to a higher state or decay. Despite the courtly love pretensions of pure love outside matrimony, both hereditary knights and ministeriales aspired to profitable marriages above their state or with moneyed ladies. The moment of utility was repressed and transferred in the literature, but the fact was not removed on the level of praxis. After an initial stage of alliance between knights and ministeriales, Walther's “revolt” showed that the former could learn how to part ways with the latter, protesting their freedom of choice, as Walther did, and threatening to leave the service of the vrouwe if she refused to behave as a wîp, that is, as a woman rather than as a mistress. Like Walther, the noble poets could go as far as to claim that she owed them as much as they owed her, or more: since they could make her, she could repay by making them—or lose them.^[63] In the meantime, this bold but just claim constitutes an important chapter in the history of poets' self-consciousness concerning the value and power of poetry to grant status and glory to the powerful.

Many key terms of the Minnesang are equivalent to those of the troubadours: gemüete, sin, tumpheit, kumber, elende, übermuot, senen, sorge, biderbe, wert, leide, and mâze correspond, respectively, to corage, “valor”; sen, “wisdom”; foldat, “folly”; ira, “sadness”; caitiu, “wretched”; orguelh, “pride”; dezirar, “to desire”; cuidar, “worry”; pro, “advantage”; valor, “worth”; sofrir, “suffering”; and mezura, “moderation.” But there were new and different terms also. Vröide corresponds to joi but with an ulterior sublimation into saelde, completely lacking in the troubadours. Despite the mystical overtone of sanctity (saelde/saelic, like sâlig and sâlida, is the etymology of G. selig, “blessed”), this concept is unlike the troubadours' assimilation of love for the lady to love for the Virgin Mary, as they did when they became affected by the religious involution after the Albigensian Crusade. It

meant, rather fatalistically, “happy through good fortune.” Similarly, the rendering of merce with lôn and gnâde (benefice, grace) stressed the unexpected character of the reward, coming as a gratuitous, rare act of favor. This further proves a lower social origin, since lords would not expect grace: they could only grant it, not receive it—and they performed neither dienst, “service,” nor arebeit, “work,” as the courtiers insisted they did.^[64]

The Minnesang remained productive, if no longer original, through the next century until, in the fifteenth century, it flowed into the art of the Meistersingers. One latter-day Minnesinger was Hugo von Montfort (1357–1423), a great nobleman from the Vorarlberg who served as intendant of the Austrian Duke Leopold III and governor in Swiss and Austrian provinces. His poetry combines the duties of the Christian knight with the canons of Ritterdienst and Minnedienst, chivalry and courtly love, and praises, instead of an unreachable lady, the three women to whom he was successively happily married. The process of Christianization is somewhat analogous to that which we can observe in Spain in the same century, but it is interesting to catch a German high aristocrat in the act of transcending the original social functions of courtly love.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a fashion of erotic allegory (Minneallegorie ) which did not tire of reproducing a set progress of the knight riding through a forest where he meets a beautiful lady: she leads him to a castle where he makes the acquaintance of a series of female allegorical figures that reproduce such familiar chivalric virtues as Love, Joy, Honor, Chastity, Constancy, and Honesty.^[65]Die Jagd (ca. 1335) of the knight Hadamar von Laber from the High Palatinate is regarded as the high point in the genre for the early period. It was often imitated both in subject matter and in its way of using the “Titurel-stanza.” In the flowery style that often characterizes such compositions, Hadamar has an allegorical hunter pursue a deer with the help of his spiritual forces, the hounds Triuwe, Staete, Fröude, Liebe, Leide, Trûren, Sene, Harre, and more, but to no avail, since this kind of hunt can have no end (Ende ) except in death.

A related, not always distinguishable subgenre was the Minnerede, which established itself in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. After reaching a definite form in the second quarter, it lived on through the remainder of the century and, in newly adapted form, even through the sixteenth century. It was an aristocratic diversion (Heinrich Niewöhner, its most outstanding student, declared it composed exclusively

for the nobility, at least in the early stage).^[66] In the form of a set rhetorical speech the Minnerede discussed the specific virtues (sometimes personified and allegorized) that preside over the exercise of true love, namely Treue, Staete, Ehre, Wahrhaftigkeit, and Verschwiegenheit, together with the classic obstacles interposed by the lady's indifference. It also debated the choice between high love or mere friendship, romantic love or sexual gratification, a married lady or a virgin, and the question whether the lady ought to prefer a knight or a cleric. The medieval court of love and its attendant games and judgments found a new garb which replaced the Minnesang' s lyrical expression of personal feeling and experience with abstract theoretical debate on set themes in rhymed oratorical form.

The three discrete codes (the courtly, the chivalric/heroic, and the chivalric/courtois or, more simply, the courtly, the chivalrous, and the courtois ) do not correspond to separate genres. All in all, however, the third code was the staple of the medieval love lyric, whereas the romance, to which I shall turn next, incorporated all three in different stages, often wavering in its uneasy relationship with the second and the third.