Provençal, Language and Literature

PROVENÇAL, LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. - Strictly speaking, there is no longer today a Provençal language, but only a system of dialects of southern France, distinguished from that of the French dialects by a certain number of important characteristics, on the whole more conservative. It comprises all the dialects south of an ideal line which, starting in the west from the estuary of the Gironde, follows the Dordogne for a stretch, rises in an arc around the Massif Central including Limousin and Auvergne, then descends to the Rhône, cuts it between Vienne and Valence, crosses the Dauphiné as far as the junction of the Cottian and Maritime Alps, and finally follows the latter, ending at the sea near Monaco. In the Middle Ages the domain of these dialects extended further north, toward the Loire, perhaps including Poitevin as well; and upon them there was elaborated, with the characteristics of a koiné, a literary language of importance no less than the others of the nascent Romance world. Dante designated it, from its affirmative particle, as the lingua de oc, to distinguish it from its Italian sister, that of si, and the French one, that of oil; but in usage the name Provençal became fixed, from the thirteenth century onward, though strictly speaking improper, since it refers to a linguistic area far vaster than Provence properly so called, vaster indeed than the Roman Provincia itself. To this linguistic differentiation of the south from the north of France there contributed the earlier and more intense Romanization, the different pre-Latin substrate (Celto-Ligurian in the south, Gaulish in the north), the different Germanic superstrate (Visigoths, then Burgundians in the south, Franks in the north), and finally all the historical and geographical conditions that in the Middle Ages allowed a notable independence to the Duchy of Aquitaine and in general to the whole life of the south.

The first text of Provençal literature that has come down to us, in a manuscript of the abbey of Fleury-sur-Loire, now at Orléans, is the fragment of a didactic-hagiographic poem on Boethius, regarded as a martyr of Christianity: this poem, in laisses of decasyllables, must have been composed around the middle of the 11th century by a man of Limousin who drew inspiration from a Latin biography and directly from the De consolatione philosophiae. A few decades later is another hagiographic poem, whose manuscript, now at Leiden, has the same provenance as the first, although the text belongs instead to the Narbonne region: the Song of Saint Faith, which narrates, in laisses of octosyllables, the life and martyrdom of the legendary saint venerated at Agen and at Conques, drawing on the Latin accounts of her passion and translation, on the miracles described by Bernard of Angers, and in some parts also on the De morte persecutorum of Lactantius. Still at the end of the 11th century or on the threshold of the 12th are found some sacred lyrics (a Latin Christmas hymn interspersed with Provençal, a prayer to the Virgin, entirely Provençal, on the pattern of well-known Latin hymns), in a manuscript of St. Martial of Limoges, now in Paris. These elements suffice to indicate the weight that frankly religious impulses had in the rise of Provençal literature, as of the other Romance literatures.

Traditions of the schools, of clerical culture certainly had great weight also in the rise of troubadour lyric poetry, which constitutes the greater and better part of Provençal literature. It is no accident that the monastery of St. Martial at Limoges, one of the most industrious workshops of Latin rhythmic poetry since the time of Abbot Odolric (1023-40), should be found in the domains of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Aquitaine (1071-1126), the first troubadour whose poems have come down to us, certainly one of the first to practice this art, which from the tropus ecclesiae has drawn its name, and from the medieval Latin rhythmics of tropers and hymnaries repeats verse modules and strophic structures. And precisely in the time of William and in his domains there was founded by the preacher Robert of Arbrissel (1101) that monastery of Fontevrault whose singular organization, inspired by the glorification of the Mother of God, attributed authority over a mixed convent not to an abbot but to an abbess, not to a virgin but to a widow: a mystical exaltation of woman from which, according to Bezzola, William would have drawn his cue, reducing it to a profane intent, for that exaltation of woman which is the central motif of the love poetry of the troubadours.

Whether or not such a hypothesis is accepted, it is certain that between the profane love of the troubadours and the mystical love of a St. Bernard or of a with William of St-Thierry there are points of contact that are not accidental. And it is by now established that, without a continuous reference to Christian spirituality and to medieval Latin culture, the whole poetry of the troubadours would remain incomprehensible. The attempts to illuminate its origins by appealing to popular love songs, linked to old semi-pagan traditions and indirectly attested by the warnings and threats of religious authorities (G. Paris), or by tracing it directly back to classical sources, especially Ovidian ones (Schroetter), or by seeking precedents outside the Romance world, in the Arabic-Andalusian poetry of the 10th and 11th centuries (Burdach, Ribera, Nykl, Menéndez Pidal), wherever they have forgotten or neglected that immanent presupposition, have succeeded only in reaching false or one-sided perspectives. If one does not keep in mind the modes of the sacred texts and of their medieval exegesis, one risks failing to understand the elliptical structures and the supra-personal thematicism of troubadour poetry, and letting slip the intimate meaning even of the recurring key terms in its language. One will not understand, for example, a central term such as joi, transfigured from a modification of feeling into an absolute value of the spirit, unless one recalls the technical use of gaudium and delectatio in Augustinian philosophy and in the mystics (Casella, Spitzer); the sense of the characteristic pair joi and joven will escape one unless one refers back to the verse of the Introit: ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam (Errante).

But in troubadour poetry, although the modes and forms of religious culture persist, religious experience is no longer exclusive, nor dominant. From it there come to be loosened the values of a lay and aristocratic spirituality and literature, in which the relationship between lover and beloved is assimilated not only to religious devotion but also to the feudal relationship between vassal and lord, and love, even where it is not crudely sensual and seeks to spiritualize itself through a gratuitous compassion, even where it is felt and exalted as a principle of moral elevation, even of chastity, is nevertheless substantially adulterous love, extramarital. The reference to the Cathar heresy that this conception has suggested to some critics (Péladan, Rahn, De Rougemont) is, however, excessive. The "ben celare", the designating of the lady by means of pseudonyms (senhals), are not precautions of heretical esotericism, but attitudes of practical discretion, often a mere pretext for freeing the lyric from a condition of too immediate autobiography; and the solatz for which the troubadours sigh is worldly and literary delight, which may be idealized as a chrism of courtliness, but remains far removed from the sacramental claims of the Cathar consolamentum.

It is a matter, in the last analysis, of a fact of custom, quite understandable in the environment of the rich feudal castles, as cicisbeism would be in the eighteenth-century salons; and "contrasts" and "partimens" and "questions" and "courts of love", with their casuistic subtleties, are a social game. Except that the importance of "courtly love" transcends these practical and contingent aspects, to assume, in the history of Western civilization, the significance of a discovery. Not only do the social relations between the sexes establish themselves on a new plane which, in certain respects (ideas of "courting", "knight", etc.) extends down to our own day; but in the experience of love a new tone of the spirit is discovered, unknown to classical eros, a more intimate and universal human value, by which love, this "discovery of the 12th century" (Seignobos), becomes the symbol of a civilization. Between the brute instinctuality of the senses, a natural reality never disavowed, and the rigorism of moral and religious law, always recognized as superior, there comes to be carved out a world of feeling, risky in its ambiguity, subtly soft in its exquisiteness, aristocratic and intellectually refined in its manifestations, almost inexhaustible as a source of literary suggestion. The theorist, one might say the Machiavelli, of this autonomy of sentimental life, regulated by a minute etiquette iuxta propria principia, was Andreas Capellanus with his treatise De Amore, composed around 1185 and later condemned in 1277 by Bishop Stephen Tempier; but he did no more than systematize a complex of attitudes that can be grasped in their native state in troubadour lyric, which indeed finds its unity around this ideal pivot.

On the other hand, this unity should not be understood in too static a sense. Far off are the times when to a Diez Provençal poetry could seem uniform as the work of a single author. All recent criticism tends to better individuate and define, within the unity of the tradition, represented, in the songbooks that have come down to us, by about 2700 lyrics by over 400 authors, the individual personalities of these and the various modes and the varying validity of their inspiration. Attention focuses on the initiators, who by creating their poetry founded a poetics; while monotony, conventionalism, absence of inspiration, are more easily the defect of the epigones, who versified within the limits and on the models of an already constituted tradition. One sees thus how the exaltation of woman and of sentimental love appears in William IX alongside old yet still lively motifs of malicious anti-feminine satire, and of exuberant, at times coarse sensuality (hence the definition of "two-faced troubadour"). One sees, in contrast to the nascent courtly poetic school, whose head is pointed out in the person of a vassal of William, Eble viscount of Ventadorn, the disdainful song of Marcabru (datable texts: 1133-48) rising with robust invectives and sarcastic parodies, he who redeems the lowliness of his own social condition with the awareness of an art aimed, in a difficult language, at proud formal feats, and with the almost prophetic sense of his own mission, whereby his sirventes have biblical accents to lash the corruption of morals and to exhort to the crusade against the infidels of Spain. One feels the fascination of a dreamy and subtly contradictory inspiration in the theme (which is not, as some believed, a religious allegory) of distant love, sung by Jaufre Rudel, prince of Blaye (d. on the Second Crusade). One recognizes in Bernard of Ventadorn (activity: 1158-80), the best representative of the school of Eble, the most limpid voice of troubadour poetry, which pours forth with spontaneous musicality in songs of ecstatic tenderness and of sweet nostalgia of love, sunlit with radiant images and stirred by a brisk readiness of intuitions. Against his trobar leu, that is, easy and graceful, which the elegant Pietro Roger and the passionate Beatrice, countess of Dia (the most remarkable among the seventeen poetesses who mark the female participation in the troubadour movement), also practiced, stands the trobar clus, as it would be called today, hermetic, of Raimbaut d'Aurenga (1150-73), with his exasperated search for lexical harshness, phonic and conceptual surprises, new structures, dominated with aristocratic assurance; and later the trobar ric of Arnaut Daniel (1180-1210), fervent master of style and technique, a true "craftsman," rather than a chiseler, of arduous formal experiments (one recalls the "sestina") that aroused the admiration and imitation of Dante and Petrarch. Marcabrunian and courtly echoes interweave in Cercamon and Bernart Marti, and with more conscious yearning for perfection in Peire d'Alvernha (1158-80); trobar clus and trobar leu succeed one another in Giraut de Bornelh (1165-1200), whom Dante hailed as "poet of rectitude" and who was truly a sustained preacher, but not profound, a severe moralist, but not to the point of repudiating courtly love, like Marcabruno. Alongside the amorous, satirical, and moral notes, others sound: for example, in Bertran de Born (1181-94) the anti-bourgeois taste for arms and prowess, the spectacular exaltation of war. Nor is the religious note lacking to inspire significant compositions, from the sorrowful song of penance that William IX composed during an illness, in the thought of death, to the crusade songs of Marcabruno and Peire d'Alvernha, to the prayer and profession of faith of the latter.

In the years straddling the two centuries, troubadour poetry is in full flower. The names become more numerous, but at the same time less significant, as the distinctive notes weaken and tend to level out into fashion. Peire Vidal, of Toulouse (1180-1206), finds happy accents in a lively fantastic and sentimental humor; Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (d. after 1205) takes pleasure in varying tones and genres, from the goliardic to the epicizing; Folquet displays in his youthful poetic activity (1180-95) qualities of culture and ratiocinating doctrine, which will later lead him to the bishopric of Marseille (but some religious poems already attributed to him are probably by the namesake Folquet de Romans). And one should also remember: Gaucelm Faidit de Cabestanh, with his accents of melancholy; Arnaut de Maruelh, with his weary and somewhat prolix grace; Rigaut de Berbezilh, with his curious comparisons drawn from the Bestiaries; Raimon de Miraval, Gaucelm Faidit, Peirol, the Monk of Montaudon, etc. Decadence approaches, not caused, but only hastened by the Albigensian war, by the royal seizure of the great fiefs, by the consequent fading of that elegant life that had nourished "courtly" poetry. In the second half of the century, the most remarkable voice is the one that Peire Cardenal of Toulouse (1225-72) raises to cry out his horror at the violence committed against his land, his violent reaction against the political and economic overbearing of the clergy; he does not, however, defend heresy, and indeed preserves a sincere and profound religious sentiment: one of his best songs is addressed to the Madonna. The intensification of Marian devotion is, moreover, a characteristic of the era, and other troubadours also raised songs to the Virgin, from Perdigon and Aimeric de Belenoi in the first half of the century, to Folquet de Lunel and Deodat de Pradas in the second. An attempt to reconcile the courtly ideal with the new breath of religiosity is that of Guilhem de Montanhagol (1233-58), of whom it is debated whether, and to what extent, he is to be considered a precursor of the stilnovists.

This leads to considering the diffusion achieved in the meantime by troubadour poetry. Already at the beginning of the 12th century, from Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Peire Vidal, Aimeric de Peguilhan, to Uc de Saint Circ, Provençal troubadours disembark at Genoa, descend into Piedmont, cross Lombardy as far as the March of Treviso: the marquises of Montferrat, the counts of Savoy, the Malaspina, the Este, Ezzelino da Romano, vie in welcoming and honoring them. Others, numerous, like Marcabruno before them, cross the Pyrenees and visit the courts of Aragon and Castile: here lived for a long time the one who was called "the last of the troubadours,"

Giraldo Riquier (1254-82). Catalan poets arose in competition, who, from William of Berguedan to his namesake of Cervera (called Cerveri), adopted Provençal as a literary language; among them the sovereign Alfonso II himself (1162-96). Thus in northern Italy, from the end of the 12th century to the beginning of the 14th, from Pier della Cavarana to Ferrarino da Ferrara, Provençal was the language of courtly lyric, and in Provençal wrote with propriety the Bolognese Rambertino Buvalelli and the Mantuan Sordello, the Genoese Lanfranco Cigala and Bonifacio Calvo as well as the Venetian Bartolomeo Zorzi, even Tuscans such as Dante da Maiano and Terramagnino da Pisa. In regions geographically and linguistically more distant, such as Galicia, Sicily, Germany, or where there was already a glorious literary tradition, as in northern France, poetic schools arose which repeated Provençal modes in their mother tongue. The poetry of the troubadours thus stands as the starting point of all European lyric; and if today, after the discovery of the Mozarabic khargias, with which one goes back to the middle of the 11th century, one can no longer repeat that those of the troubadours were the first lyric verses in a Neo-Latin language, one can well repeat that theirs was the first literary movement in which a high and complex artistic consciousness expressed itself, a movement decisive at the roots of all modern Western poetry.

The work of the troubadours is remarkable also from the musical point of view: the 264 melodies that have come down to us show a technique closely linked to that of Gregorian chant, with smaller amplitudes but with greater squareness of design, with a more marked tendency to consolidate rhythm in short periods and the tonal sense in modes closer to the present major and minor.

Lesser was the importance of Provençal literature in other fields. It was once believed (Fauriel) in a southern primogeniture also in epic, but the few poems that have come down to us, among which the long Girart de Roussillon stands out, are later than the French flowering and dependent on it (Fierabras, Ronsavals, etc.). Provençal was nevertheless the first poem on the Crusade of the East, of which a reworked fragment remains (Chanso d'Antioche); and historical poems gave rise in the 14th century to the Albigensian war and that of Navarre. Romance poetry gives a notable Arthurian romance, the Jaufré, and above all a delightful courtly romance, the Flamenca (first half of the 13th century); but little else, and that little of scant importance. Didactic poetry is represented by various ensenhamens and by the labored Breviari d'Amor of Matfre Ermengau (d. 1322); drama by some mysteries of the end of the 13th century (Esposalizi de nostra Dona Santa Maria) or of the 14th (Passion of ms. Didot; Jeu de s. Agnès). In prose there are, born mostly from a fanciful interpretation of lyric texts, vidas and razos; that is, biographies and anecdotal declarations, placed in some chansonniers before the poems of individual troubadours; then edifying and didactic works, lives of saints, sermons, translations of sacred texts; a production which, independently of its scant intrinsic value, confirms the completeness of literary functions for which the ancient Provençal was truly a "language." And of this language grammars were also compiled, the first of a modern idiom: the Razos de trobar of the Catalan Raimondo Vidal, which are also a treatise on poetics, the Donat provençal of a Ugo Faidit identifiable with Ugo di Saint-Circ, Faidit that is, an exile in Italy: works therefore for the use of foreigners.

But from the 14th century onward, in Provence itself the literary and linguistic tradition now required to be sustained artificially. In 1323 the Consistori del gai saber was founded at Toulouse, and this first modern academy established the "floral games," annual poetic competitions (won the first time by Joan de Caselnou, with a song to the Virgin protectress), and its chancellor, Guglielmo Molinier, composed a lengthy treatise of grammar and poetics, the Leys d'amors. But laws and games and consistory cannot halt the decline, due to changed historical conditions. Well before the Edict of Villers-Cotterets (1539) French had imposed itself throughout the South as the language of high society and of literature (one thinks of G. Phebus, A. De la Sale, C. Marot); while the dialects, increasingly fragmented, lent themselves only to some small popular work, to some traditional genre such as the Noëls recited in the Christmas octave.

Provençal is not raised from the dialectal sphere by attempts at rebirth such as occurred at the end of the 16th century with the Gascon Du Bartas, in the 17th century with the Toulousan Pietro Goudelin (Goudoli), in the early 19th century with the school of Marseille and the hairdresser-poet Jasmin. It is raised rather by the movement founded in 1854 by seven young men, among whom were genuine poetic temperaments: Giuseppe Roumanillo, Teodoro Aubanel, Federico Mistral (v.); but it is an ephemeral rebirth. The language of the Félibres (thus these poets called themselves, adopting the obscure term with which a popular religious song designated the doctors who disputed with Jesus) was the Arlesian dialect transformed by a subtle work of philological selection and aesthetic refinement; but it never attained true completeness of literary functions, and the rapid evolution of the spoken Arlesian itself, the resistance of other strongly characterized dialects, the mutual unintelligibility among the less close ones and the consequent now habitual recourse of all to the official language of the State, French, as the language of conversation and culture, mean that Mistral's own masterpiece, Mireia, is no longer accessible today to the people for whom it was written. Contemporary Felibrism, which survived the death of Mistral and the two world wars, is and remains dialect literature.

Aurelio Roncaglia