The roots of the troubadour poetic tradition are obscure. One prominent argument suggests that it is indebted to Spanish-Arabic poetry of the eleventh century in terms of its themes and motifs:
Spanish-Arabian poetry […] celebrates love as the highest form of happiness and the noblest source of inspiration; it sings of the beloved’s beauty, the sorrow of the rejected lover and the cruelty of the lady.
It introduces new fashions in composition, as in its hymns to Spring.
Anticipating Provençal lyrics by close on two centuries, Hispano-Moorish poetry was the only one, in Europe, to cultivate those themes and to exhibit those characteristics.149
According to this interpretation, it was through “contacts with the courts of Aragon and Castile, […] intermarriage such as that of Guilhem of Poitou with Philippa of Aragon in 1094, and [ongoing] political dealings that knowledge of Hispano-Arabic love philosophies and love poetry of the tenth and eleventh centuries came to the courts and poets”150 of Occitania. We can see, if not direct influence, at least shared poetic
149 Robert S. Briffault. The Troubadours (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1965), 25.
150 Elizabeth Salter. “Courts and Courtly Love”. In The Medieval World, ed. by David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London: Aldus Books, 1973), 424.
genes, by looking at a Spanish Arabic poem contemporary to those of the troubadours. This twelfth-century work, “Gentle Now, Doves of the Thornberry and Moringa Thicket”, by a poet named Ibn Arabi,151 demonstrates many of the same themes of yearning and devotion to human, embodied love.
The poet fears the “sad cooing”152 of the doves will betray him, and asks them not to “reveal the love I hide / the sorrow I hide away”.153 This love, and its sorrow, leads to thoughts of “a grove of tamarisks”
where “spirits wrestled, / bending the limbs down over me, / passing me away”, bringing him “yearning”, and “breaking of the heart”.154 The tamarisks may reference the story of Abraham, or as the Qur’án refers to him, Ibrahim, who plants a tamarisk grove in Genesis 21 as a recognition of the struggle, negotiation, and coming to peace in a property dispute between Abraham and Abimelech. The wrestling of the spirits could be those of the two ancient patriarchs, or it could be something more like the struggle captured in the story of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, who wrestles, not with an angel, but with El (God) himself, reflected in the name he is given in Genesis 32:28 after the dusk-to-dawn wrestling match, “Israel”, or, “he struggled with God”. Perhaps this captures part of Arabi’s suggestion, but references to “yearning” and “breaking of the heart”, raise the possibility that something more intimate and personal is happening. Is it more of an internal struggle, the spirit who took me and forced me to struggle with and confront my own yearning? Perhaps the spirit Arabi is wrestling with is the difficulty he experiences in discovering the meaning of his own yearnings, the desires that dogmatic religion would tell him to reject.
This wrestling leads Arabi through images of a “faithless” woman
“who dyes herself red with henna”,155 a person (perhaps a tradition) practiced in taking the devotion of another, soaking it up, and then throwing that other away. The image evokes a woman who soaks up a dying man’s blood with her own hair, draining the life of a fool who gave
151 The translation used here is that of Michael Sells, in Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 70–71.
152 Ibid., l. 6.
153 Ibid., ll. 7–8 154 Ibid., ll. 13–18.
155 Ibid., ll. 39–40.
it in return for nothing. Finally, Arabi comes to the extremity of saying that “the house of stone” (a house of worship blessed by the Prophet of Islam) pales in comparison to “a man or a woman”.156 The Ka’bah, the cubic building in Mecca that is circled seven times counterclockwise—
what does that mean, what significance does that hold, when compared to the living reality of the man or woman standing in front of you? Even the sacred books, the Torah, the Qur’án, are held lightly next to what Arabi calls “the religion of love”, pledging that “wherever its caravan turns along the way, / that is the belief, / the faith I keep”.157 What the poem suggests is the necessity of struggling with and accepting one’s own yearnings before coming to a place of peace. We are not sinful because we desire; we are not broken because we want. This is an emphatically humane vision.
While this poem is not exactly the same in its emphasis as the troubadour poems, it makes precisely the same kinds of people uncomfortable: “the poem is the ‘yes and no’ that makes the Averroist—
and all other priests—blanch […] [due to its] intractable and purposeful blurring of sacred and profane love”.158 The power in this work is that of the individual perspective, of singular passion, of the realization that there is something more important in this world than can be found in the traditional symbols and institutions of law, religion, state, and family. Each of these speak a language that essentially boils down to the same demand: “obey”. But the “religion of love” is not about obeying. It is about being led where passion, insight, and desire lead you—the path Blake called “the road of excess” which “leads to the palace of wisdom”.159
The road of excess was the favored highway of the first troubadour poet, Guilhem IX, the duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou (modern Poitiers). He was a man who did not care for any authority other than his own—twice excommunicated from the Church, on the first occasion he threatened to behead the bishop who pronounced the sentence, only to think better of it and tell the cleric whose neck was already extended for the sword’s blow: “you shall never enter Heaven with the help of
156 Ibid., ll. 35–36.
157 Ibid., ll. 57–60.
158 Menocal, 75.
159 William Blake. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. In The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 35.
my hand”. The second time, Guilhem was excommunicated for refusing to give up his mistress, the Viscountess of Châtellraut, telling the bald bishop of Angoulême that “the comb shall curl your wayward hair before I give up the Viscountess”.160
Guilhem was a man of action and of words, who had a “sardonic wit:
he ordered that his mistress’s portrait should be painted on his shield […] declaring that ‘it was his will to bear her in battle as she had borne him in bed’”.161 His poems combine frank enjoyment of sex with longing for love, but the clearest indication of his preference for love in deeds rather than merely in words can be seen in the final lines of his poem Ab la dolchor del temps novel (In the sweetness of the new times):
Que tal se van d’amor gaban Nos n’avem la pessa e·l coutel.162 Those others vainly talk of love
But we have a piece [of bread], and a knife.
Love was not sublimated in worship for Guilhem—its passions were raw, and its excitements were those of the heart, the eyes, and the senses.
In Farai chansoneta nueva (I will write a new song), Guilhem asks what the use could possibly be in withdrawing from the world of life, love, and pleasure:
Qal pro y auretz, s’ieu m’enclostre E no·m retenetz per vostre?
Totz lo joys del mon es nostre, Dompna, s’amduy nos amam.163
What can it bring you if I cloister myself And you do not keep me for your own?
All the joys of the world are ours Lady, if we love each other in turn.
160 Topsfield, 12–13.
161 Helen Castor. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (London:
Faber and Faber, 2010), 133–34.
162 Guillaume IX. Les Chansons de Guillaume IX, Duc d’Aquitaine, ed. by Alfred Jeanroy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1913), 26, ll. 29–30, https://archive.org/stream/leschanso nsdegui00willuoft#page/26
163 Ibid., 21, ll. 25–28, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#page/21
This idea of lovers loving each other in turn is one of the first and most basic elements of the concept that will come to be called fin’amor. As the later poet Bernart de Ventadorn argues, love must be mutual in order for it to be true.
Though Guilhem wishes for a mutual love, he also wishes for a physical love, and the physicality of his desire is made clear in a number of places. In Ben vuelh que sapchon li pluzor (I want everyone to know), he writes of “a bawdy game” (“un joc grossier”)—in which, after being told “your dice are too small” (“vostre dat som menudier”), he “raised the table” (“levat lo taulier”) and then “tossed the dice” (“empeis los datz”), upon which toss “two of them rolled and the third plumbed the depths” (“duy foron cairavallier / e·l terz plombatz”).164 A poem in which a man attempts to prove that two of his “dice” are not too small for that third one to plombatz is not a poem with any great allegorical potential. Neither is Companho faray un vers…convinen (I will make a poem as it should be), in which Guilhem compares two mistresses to horses he greatly enjoys riding:165
Dos cavalhs ai a ma selha ben e gen;
Bon son e adreg per armas e valen;
Mas no·ls puesc amdos tener que l’us l’autre non cossen.
Si·ls pogues adomesjar e mon talen, Ja no volgra alhors mudar mon guarnimen,
Que miels for’ encavalguatz de nuill [autr’] ome viven.166
I have two horses, noble and good for my saddle:
Good and strong in combat and valor;
But I can’t keep both, because they hate each other.
If I could tame them to my desire,
I would not move my equipment anywhere else, For I would be mounted better than any man alive.
164 Ibid., 15–16, ll. 45, 51, 57–60, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft
#page/15
165 As Peter Dronke asks, “would it ever have occurred to any reader or listener to interpret” such poems as this, or many other troubadour verses, “in any other than a sexual way if scholars had not invented the troubadours’ ‘platonic’ love?”
(Dronke, 242, n. 3).
166 Guillaume IX, 1, ll. 7–12, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#
page/n24
In Ab la dolchor del temps novel, Guilhem prays for nothing so much as the gift of more life, and more erotic love—not in words, but in the deeds forbidden by the churchmen who speak in “foreign Latin”:
Enquer me lais Dieus viure tan C’aja mas manz soz so mantel.
Qu’eu non ai soing d’estraing lati Que·m parta de mon Bon Vezi.167
God give me a life long enough To get my hands beneath her dress.
For I have no fear that foreign Latin Will part me from my Good Neighbor.
This is not “courtly love”. This is the expression of frankly physical desire. The first troubadour was not a man who regarded love as a path to the divine, or the woman right in front of him as a window through which he should learn to see God. For the passionate and sometimes violent Guilhem, love was a crucial part of a life here and now that is to be celebrated without apology and without genuflection to gods above or devils below. Love—in all its emotional and physical glories—needed no justification. Guilhem was a man many modern academics would not like, and the feeling would probably be mutual.
Ab la dolchor del temps novel is a poem that openly praises “the physical love which can be desired, hoped for, shared and enjoyed”.168 The poem’s “switch from delicacy” to “rough desire” is “characteristic of Guilhem and intentional”—especially in the “jest at those who talk and never do”,169 where Guilhem anticipated at least a few of his later critics. In Mout jauzens me prenc en amar (I take a great joy in love), a favorite of those commentators who try to squeeze Guilhem into the category of “courtly love”,170 he writes of keeping love for himself, “to
167 Ibid., 26, ll. 23–26, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#page/26 168 Topsfield, 27.
169 Ibid.
170 Sarah Spence, for example, insists that “the lady here is presented as a Christ figure”
(Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 91), basing this on the lines “And since I wish to return to joy / It is right, that I seek for the best” (“E pus en joy vuelh revertir / Ben dey, si puesc, al mielhs anar”)
refresh the heart / and renew the flesh”,171 in verses that present “all excellence in physical reality”.172 And yet, Guilhem had something of the sceptic of Ecclesiastes about him, as if desire’s fulfillment would never really bring him what he hoped for. In Pus vezem de novel florir (Since we see new blossoms), Guilhem complains:
Per tal n’ai meyns de bon saber Quar vuelh so que no puesc aver173
So I know less than any what is good Because I want what I cannot get.
This scepticism leads him to the position (adopted perhaps, only in his more reflective of moments) that Tot is niens—all is nothing, rather in the fashion of Koheleth, from Ecclesiastes 1:14:
׃ַחוּ ֽר תוּ ֥ע ְרוּ לֶבֶ֖ה ל ֹּ֛כַה ה ֵּ֥נ ִה ְו שׁ ֶמ ָּׁ֑שַה תַח ַּ֣ת וּ ֖שֲׂעַּנׁ ֶֽש םי ִׂ֔שֲעּ ַמ ַֽה ־לָּכ ־ת ֶא ֙י ִתי ִ֙א ָר I have seen all the works done beneath the sun; behold, all are vanity, a striving after the wind.
In Topsfield’s view, “Guilhem appears to reject Amors as an embryonic regulated system of courtly wooing. He is dissatisfied with it and the small amount of Jois it affords. He stands to one side and looks for the Jois which is the reward of each individual man”,174 an individual man who loves, wholly and physically, an individual woman, but not in accordance with anyone’s expected code of behavior, courtly or otherwise. Discussion of this poem has long been divided over whether it is “a burlesque” or “a serious love lyric”.175 The dichotomy is a false one, reflecting a Neoplatonic, anti-body, anti-sex bias. For Guilhem, the so-called burlesques (a term imposed by scholars) and the so-called
(Guillaume IX, 21–22, ll. 3–4). The lenses of “courtly love”, once donned, appear to make it impossible to see otherwise.
171 “Per lo cor dedins refrescar / E per la carn renovellar” (Guillaume IX, 23, ll. 34–35, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#page/23).
172 Topsfield, 36.
173 Guillaume IX, 17, ll. 19–20, https://archive.org/stream/leschansonsdegui00willuoft#
page/17 174 Topsfield, 30.
175 Ibid. Reddy repeats this distinction throughout his discussion of Guilhem’s poetry (92–104).
serious love lyrics (another imposition) are expressions of different aspects of the same desire: “He desires the joys of shared love, and that the lady shall belong to him, and he to her”.176
Guilhem was a man who bristled at restrictions, found the claims of those who would tell him what to do intolerable and absurd, and wanted to find a way to achieve and maintain Jois, an “individual happiness” in a world in which Amor was constantly threatened with extinction.177 In that way, Guilhem embodies both the troubadours’ distinctiveness and that which made them a threat to be eliminated by thirteenth-century Crusaders and Inquisitors, or an embarrassing excess to be allegorized away by the Akibas and Origens of the modern academy. These poets sought for a way to find Jois in a world of rules, laws, and demands for obedience; they sought—even in what many scholars insist on describing as “conventional” language—to find a way to express a new (or long-suppressed) desire, not for stability or order, not for matrimony and fidelity, but for love: mutual, embodied, and not to be abandoned at the commands of any bishop, bald or otherwise.
The mutuality of fin’amor, the love sought and celebrated by the troubadours, is wonderfully expressed by Marcabru, a poet often described as a moralist who condemned the excesses of court life. But in Per savi·l tenc ses doptanssa (Doubtless, I think him wise), he defines what he calls bon’Amors (good love, or the best love) as “two desires in a single longing” (“dos desirs d’un enveia”),178 and further identifies Jois as one of the benefits of fin’amor or bon’Amors, which itself is “the assured happiness of a love which does not deceive”, a love that is wholly “without deceit and cannot be degraded”.179 What Marcabru rails against is what he calls “false love against true” (“Falss’ Amor encontra fina”), condemning “the group of liars” (“la gen frairina”) who slander love, and the man “whose love lives by rape and pillage”
(“car s’Amors viu de rapina”).180 Marcabru finally curses all such liars and defamers of fin’amor:
176 Ibid., 39.
177 Ibid.
178 Marcabru., ed. by Jean Dejeanne (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1909), XXXVII, 178–83, l. 28, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f191.image
179 Topsfield, 83–84.
180 Marcabru, ll. 14, 20, 51, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f191.image and http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f193.image
La cuida per qu’el bobanssa li sia malaventura.181
Let the ideas they are so proud of bring them to bad ends.
From the troubadours themselves, we see emerging at this point a definition of fin’amor that is comprised of mutual desire between lovers, honesty, and a refusal to let love be defined by social convention, or become a vehicle of self-interest and rapina.182 As Topsfield explains:
[B]ehind Marcabru’s Fin'amors there is also the idea of man as part of the nature which was created by God, and able to respond entirely to this nature that has been given to him […]. His merit is that he […] can assimilate his carnal desire, which is his God-given natura, to a higher concept of love, Fin'amors, which is constant and free from deceit.183
Here we have a poet for whom human natura is not inherently wicked, for whom carnal sexuality is not fallen, and the body is not shameful. If there is a “heresy” here, it is not the “Gnostic” view of the Cathars, but the rather gentler “Pelagian” view—a belief that human nature is not fallen and that the world is a good and beautiful place. The fact that this is a “heresy” speaks volumes about the perversity of “orthodoxy”.
From Marcabru, then, we can add another element to our definition of fin’amor: the mutuality of bodily and sexual desire between equal partners. The mutual desire between lovers is both physical and emotional. It is not merely a repressed or sublimated eros; it is the fully and powerfully physical expression of love and desire, combined with mutual choice and honesty. It is a love which does not live by rapina, by taking, forcing, pillaging, raping. It is a love in which we can see dos desirs d’un’ enveia, one longing formed from two desires, one heart formed from two.
181 Ibid., ll. 61–62, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4240c/f194.image
182 Charles Camproux argues that mutuality and equality are the primary characteristics of fin’amor: “Cette notion d’égalité entre les partenaires est une des plus importantes qui entrent dans la conception de l’amour chez les troubadours” [This notion of equality between partners is one of the most important that go into the concept of love in the troubadours] (Charles Camproux. Le “joy d’amor” des troubadours. Jeu et joie d’amour [Montpellier: Causse et Castelnau], 1965, 179).
183 Topsfield, 103.
One reason that Marcabru is often referred to as a moralist may be because of his oft-made distinction between fin’amor and fals’amor (or Amar). He is angry with those who would turn love into a tool of rapina, those for whom the pairings between lovers are either merely about lust (Amar), or for whom money and power are the primary
One reason that Marcabru is often referred to as a moralist may be because of his oft-made distinction between fin’amor and fals’amor (or Amar). He is angry with those who would turn love into a tool of rapina, those for whom the pairings between lovers are either merely about lust (Amar), or for whom money and power are the primary