Troubadours in Debate: The Breviari d'Amor

Abstract

Matfre Ermengaud's thirteenth-century Occitan encyclopedia, the Breviari d'Amor, concludes with a treatise on courtly love, the “Perilhos tractat d'amor de donas segon que han tractat li antic trobador en lors cansos.” In this treatise, the chief figures of courtly love—the lovers, ladies, troubadours, and maldizen, with Matfre as narrator and participant—dispute key tenets of love, quoting frequently from numerous troubadour lyrics in order to prove their arguments. In fact, the “Perilhos tractat” presents quotations of troubadour lyric in a disputative manner so as to highlight the troubadours as themselves in debate, although the Breviari purports to be structured by the overarching principle of love dictated by the visual mnemonic metaphor of the Tree of Love. This study examines the quotations of the troubadour lyrics here as dialectical, then, rather than as expressing and confirming a unitary vision of Natural Love. The “Perilhos tractat” is a debate not simply on love but also on the understanding and reception of the troubadours more broadly; that is, Matfre's dialectical use of troubadour lyric generates a broader debate about the meaning of the troubadours’ lyrics and their poetic legacy in the late thirteenth century.

Keywords:

• debate
• dialectic
• lyric
• poetics
• troubadours

Notes

1. All translations are mine.

2. Matfre's “Dregz de natura comanda” appears at v. 300 and again in the “Perilhos tractat” within the discussion of the virtue of knowledge ‘conoichensa’ (vv. 33239–49). This lyric also opens six Breviari manuscripts. Matfre's “Temps es qu'ieu mo sens espanda” also appears at the opening of three of these six manuscripts. See Bolduc, Medieval 122–27. Hereinafter, all quotations from Matfre's Breviari are from vol. 5.

3. To my knowledge, no music accompanies the quotations in the “Perilhos tractat.”

4. “D'aquesta natural amor/an mout cantat li trobador,/dizen de lieis en mans loguals,/alqu grans bes, alqu grans mals,/sequon qu'ieu hai trobat escrig” (vv. 27791–95; “Of this natural love the troubadours have often sung, speaking of it in many places, some great things, some bad, according to what I have found written”).

5. Defining anaphoric communication, Meneghetti writes, “The recourse to the term anaphora (a technical term in linguistics meaning: ‘the repetition of one or more words at the start of consecutive or nearby clauses or lines’) is justified since the constituent texts in a literary dialogue could be seen to form a construct which is ideally unitary” (195n3).

6. Technically speaking, a tenso allows the interlocutors to debate ideas freely, whereas in a partimen the questioner limits the topic for his interlocutor.

7. Routledge finds a certain link between the vidas of the troubadours and this song (“Pos Peire” 321–23); see also Hoepffner, who argues that the legends of the vida derive from literal readings of Peire's lyrics; on the vidas generally, see Boutière and Schutz 351–352.

8. Incidentally, “Greu fera nulls hom falhensa” is set beside “Sitot me soi a tart aperceubutz” in three manuscripts (N, Q, U), which would perhaps also evoke Folquet's debate with Peire Vidal (Folquet de Marseille 114–15). Peire also names Folquet elsewhere in his lyric: for example, he directs his “Ajotar e lassar” (PC 364, 2) to Folquet (vv. 91–95). See Avalle 1.33 and 43n91; Anglade 61.

9. In this we are reminded that dialectic, identified with logic, is (like a paideia) aimed at a universal audience. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité 48 and New 37; see also McKeon.

10. This is a new rhetorical idea: presence displays “certain elements on which the speaker wants to center attention in order that they may occupy the foreground of the hearer's consciousness” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité 190 and New 142) because this presence acts directly on our sensibility (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité 156 and New 116–17). For an alternative view, see Gadamer, who argues that perception leaves behind the accidental and the unessential, i.e., the private particular being of the actor (103).