The Troubadours

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Few literatures have exerted so profound an influence upon the literary history of other peoples as the poetry of the troubadours. Attaining the highest point of technical perfection in the last half of the twelfth and the early years of the thirteenth century, Provençal poetry was already popular in Italy and Spain when the Albigeois crusade devastated the south of France and scattered the troubadours abroad or forced them to seek other means of livelihood. The earliest lyric poetry of Italy is Provençal in all but language; almost as much may be said of Portugal and Galicia; Catalonian troubadours continued to write in Provençal until the fourteenth century. The lyric poetry of the "trouvères" in Northern France was deeply influenced both in form and spirit by troubadour poetry, and traces of this influence are perceptible even in early middle-English lyrics. Finally, the German minnesingers knew and appreciated troubadour lyrics, and imitations or even translations of Provençal poems may be found in Heinrich von Morungen, Friedrich von Hausen, and many others. Hence the poetry of the troubadours is a subject of first-rate importance to the student of comparative literature.

The northern limit of the Provençal language formed a line starting from the Pointe de Grave at the mouth of the Gironde, passing through Lesparre, Bordeaux, Libourne, Périgueux, rising northward to Nontron, la Rochefoucauld, Confolens, Bellac, then turning eastward to Guéret and Montluçon; it then went south-east to Clermont-Ferrand, Boën, Saint Georges, Saint Sauveur near Annonay. The Dauphiné above Grenoble, most of the Franche-Comté, French Switzerland and Savoy, are regarded as a separate linguistic group known as Franco-Provençal, for the reason that the dialects of that district display characteristics common to both French and Provençal. On the south-west, Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Isles must also be included in the Provençal region. As concerns the Northern limit, it must not be regarded as a definite line of demarcation between the langue d'oil or the Northern French dialects and the langue d'oc or Provençal. The boundary is, of course, determined by noting the points at which certain linguistic features peculiar to Provençal cease and are replaced by the characteristics of Northern French. Such a characteristic, for instance, is the Latin tonic a before a single consonant, and not preceded by a palatal consonant, which remains in Provençal but becomes e in French; Latin cantare becomes chantar in Provençal but chanter in French. But north and south of the boundary thus determined there was, in the absence of any great mountain range or definite geographical line of demarcation, an indeterminate zone, in which one dialect probably shaded off by easy gradations into the other.

Within the region thus described as Provençal, several separate dialects existed, as at the present day. Apart from the Franco-Provençal on the north-east, which we have excluded, there was Gascon in the south-west and the modern départements of the Basses and Hautes Pyrénées; Catalonian, the dialect of Roussillon, which was brought into Spain in the seventh century and still survives in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands....