the provençal trobairitz and the limits of courtly love

The Provençal Trobairitz and the Limits of Courtly LoveAuthor(s): Marianne ShapiroReviewed work(s):Source: Signs, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1978), pp. 560-571Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173171 .

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The Provencal Trobairitz and the Limits of Courtly Love

Marianne Shapiro

Even in its most pacific states, poetry remains a form of energy release. Tradition, in fact, even links it specifically to exploits of violence in arms ever since Plato found wrath and desire interchangeable within the pas- sionate being. Classical and medieval psychological theory consistently recognize in ira and concupiscentia two allied categories of the appetite. And the earliest known troubadours-Guilhem of Poitou, Marcabru- privilege two basic metaphors when they describe the generating process of their discourse: the poet is a procreating lover or a conquering war- rior.' In the case of Provencal lyric, the relationship between love and

polemicizing aggression finds a prominent place within an encompassing aesthetics of antithesis and internal contradiction. The canso ("song," secondarily "love song") shows that the initial violence of erotic experi- ence has been sublimated only to be projected into further realms of

language. Its behavioral model of eroticism displaces another dominant model in medieval poetry: that of adversaries locked in mortal combat.2

The canso is given to enunciating the very conditions that give rise to it, thereby establishing the relationship of lover and beloved. It bodies forth a need not only to state the particular case alone but to grasp a

1. Marcabru: Qu'ieu fier autrui/ E.m gart de lui/ E no. is sap del mieu colp cobrir ...

[For I strike at others, and parry their thrusts, so that they cannot escape my blows]," Poesies completes du troubadour Marcabru, ed. J.-M.-L. Dejeanne (Toulouse: Privat, 1909),

poem 16, p. 52. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. The troubadours Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Bertran de Born make prominent use

of martial metaphors for love; in fact, Bertran rather abruptly reveals nearly in mid-poem that he is producing a song in praise of war rather than an amorous essai (see Bertran de

Born, "Quan la novela flors pare.l verjan" in his collected poems, ed. Albert Stimming [Halle: Niemayr, 1913], pp. 90-92).

[Signs:Journal o' Women n Culture and Societ0 1978. vol. 3, no. 3] ? 1978 bv The lniversitv of Chicago. All -ights reserved. 0097-9740/78/0303-0002$01.09

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stable universal quintessence as well. Its connotative strength as a statement of ideals arises from its high degree of intertextual referentiality to other poems of its kind. A superstratum of connotative bonds extends over and above the literality of the poem, simultaneously affirming through similarity and challenging through contradiction its relation to all of its kindred and to the system in which they are born,fin' amor (the Provencal variant of an all-too-general "courtly love"). Fin' amor was founded, in the first place, upon a reversal of the two halves of the humilislsublimis paradox, that of the humility which exalts its possessors. The perfectly humble lover desires acceptance by his perfectly gracious lady.3 When the poet-aspirant stood before his audience, in his own person or that of hisjoglar (performer), his love song opened outward and declared itself as public confession of particular and private experi- ence translated into universal terms. The lady stood at the pinnacle of achievement in more than the exploits of sexual love, for the poet-lover suffered both the torments of unrequited love and the ache of un- fulfilled ambition. She was the emblem of nobility itself and as such could only stand passively as the target of all his efforts.

The poetic content, forms, and the motifs of the system offin' amor were clearly not wholly suitable or applicable to women lyricists. How to utilize them and modify them was not only the challenge that confronted women lyricists but provides a test case to assess the flexibility of the system and its limits as well. Of the twenty women who are known to have composed in ProvenCal, only five tried their hand at the canso.4 The details of their brief biographies that precede the poems in manuscripts (vidas) are sufficiently reliable to inform us that the Countess of Dia, the composer of four love songs, was not the only noblewoman among them. Castelloza, whose three songs have come down to us, was the wife of a noble follower of the Dauphin of Auvergne. The Lady Tibors, whose canso exists only as an enticing fragment, was called a chatelaine; the vida of Azalais de Porcairagues terms her gentil domna et enseignada (a noble and educated lady). Of the five poets, three are certainly to be dated after the turn of the thirteenth century; the last one, Clara d'Anduza, is associated with the name of the late troubadour Uc de St Circ. Azalais is dated in the late twelfth century; she and the otherwise unidentified

3. See Muriel Kittel, "Humility in Old Provencal and Early Italian Poetry: Re- semblances and Contrasts," Romance Philology 27 (August 1974): 158-71.

4. Some of the poems have been edited separately in a number ofjournals, but only two complete editions are extant. The first (from which my citations are taken) is Oskar Schultz-Gora, Die provenzalischen Dichterinnen (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1888). The other is Jules Veran, Les Poetesses provencales du moyen age (Paris: Quillet, 1946), which draws almost entirely from Schultz-Gora. The poems are still in need of detailed critical analysis, which has not emerged in the recent work by Meg Bogin, The Woman Troubadors (London: Pad- dington Press, 1975). The chief value of Bogin's book lies in the translations of the poems. The author is not successful in her attempt to represent the tenets of courtly love in consonance with the trobairitz.

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Countess of Dia are the sole composers who cannot be securely claimed to have postdated the widespread accession to writing and reading that greatly affected the propagation of the poem as written text.5

The displacement of the male lyricist by a female lyricist is the basic shift that generates a number of other modifications within the available repertory of topoi in the system offin' amor. That a woman had become the subject of enunciation meant that she posited herself as suppliant and her lover as recipient, thus reversing the two polar humilities and triggering a movement of both male and female poles toward the center and neutralizing her domination through her femaleness. At the same time we cannot assume that the woman qua the beloved of a man de- scended from her immobility at the apex of value before the very audience that would seek to place her there, ousted her suitor from his agonistic position in order to assume it in his stead, and left her former place untenanted without exciting a polemic that would attack the core of the humilislsublimis paradox as it pertains to the hierarchy of courtly love.

Indeed, if the language of desire in troubadour lyric travels along an axis of "possession-nonpossession" as Leo Spitzer claimed,6 we can recognize a more essential paradox in the logic of the trobairitz (women troubadours) that eclipses the historico-cultural one of humility/ sublimity: the capsized situation in which desire must express itself as the wish to be possessed; the beloved is, as the Countess of Dia, the best known of the trobairitz, puts it: "cel qu'ieu plus desir que m'aia [he whom I most desire to have me]." The desiring subject would be, in potentia, the desired object.

The extant cansos of the trobairitz contain an easily discerned measure of imminent violence beyond the persistent images of danger, violence, and death that tend to accompany love in the Proven?al lyric. The maintenance of the bond between love and personal value acquires a new urgency here now that the suppliant lady must establish her creden- tials as a fit exponent of love. Like the songs of other troubadours, the

5. A long-standing controversy and encompassing mystery surround the identity of this Countess of Dia (perhaps a misnomer: Comtessa was a Provencal forename as well). The search has proceeded in apparently the only possible way: through possible identification of husband(s) or lover(s). For various speculations, see Jean Boutiere and A. H. Schutz, Les Biographies des troubadours (Paris: Nizet, 1964), pp. 445-46. Worth noting in the welter of possibilities is that suggested by William Pattison, The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d'Orange (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), p. 118, to the effect that the Comtessa was connected amorously with a grand-nephew of the troubadour, called Raimbaut VI, who died in 1218. This would date her considerably later than has been supposed by many scholars and would reaffirm the causal bond between the spread of literacy over the twelfth century and the flowering of love lyrics by Provencal ladies; and would speak for their more private nature.

6. Leo Spitzer, L'Amour lointain de Jaufre Rudel et le sense de la poesie des troubadours, University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), now in Etudes de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 82.

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cansos of the trobairitz are preoccupied with self-justification; the praise of the beloved becomes a pretext for the defense of the song's existence. The controversy is to be inserted into the larger question of whether the lady has the right to plead (as Provencal lovers put it) her cause. The positions taken by the poets fall in various degrees along a scale leading to a simple reversal of hierarchical roles.7 An earlier tenso between Ber- nard de Ventadorn and Peire (probably Peire d'Alvernhe), for example, finds Peire upholding the conservative view that "it is not becoming for ladies to make love-pleas; it is fitting that men plead with them and beg their mercy."8 As long as lover and lady are felt to be related as aspirant and ideal, respectively, the lady may even grant the lover all he prays for and still retain her dignity, enclosed in the anonymity of the senhal (or pseudonymic sign) that represents her in the poem. But con- cern or desire on the lady's part would transform her into a mortal and desiring creature, like a man, but otherwise automatically relegated to inferior status.

When the Countess of Dia reproaches her errant beloved, "Membre vos cals fo. 1 commenssamens de nostr'amor [remember the beginning of our love]," she implies a previous sexual dynamic between a masculine suppliant and a graciously acquiescent lady who masks the passion she feels, much like Francesca did in Dante's Inferno. The countess seems to be gravitating away from this system toward the system of narrative romance, as indeed Dante did when he made Francesca and Paolo exe- cute the kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere.9 But whereas the representation of female character as obsessively erotic in almost all of the literary traditions known to the Middle Ages is all but excluded from the troubadour canso, the lyrics of the trobairitz delineate an intermediary state and perceive that state as the ground of strife.

The three poems of Castelloza, dated at the beginning of the thirteenth century, each contains argumentative justification of her trobar. She appropriates the troubadour topos of singing to relieve her grief, which is also present in the "letter" from Hermione to Orestes:"fiere licet certe; flendo defundimus iram ... [I can weep at least; in weeping I let my wrath pour forth]."10 Castelloza writes, "I know it is fitting for me,

7. For the concept of the reversal of hierarchy as the essential process in metaphoriza- tion, see Michael and Marianne Shapiro, Hierarchy and the Structure of Tropes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

8. In Thomas Goddard Bergin and Raymond T. Hill, Anthology of the Provencal Troubadours (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 1:52-53.

9. Inferno 5 contains the famous story of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, in which Dante allots to Francesca the only speaking role while the shade of Paolo stands aside in grief. However, Francesca dwells on the story as seen from Paolo's perspective and amends the situation of Lancelot and Guinevere to make Paolo the aggressor in love and the giver of the fatal kiss.

10. Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1921), 8.1.61, p. 78.

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though all say that it is improper for a lady to court a knight herself and to hold him such long speeches all the time, but whoever says that de- cides wrongly; for I will plead rather than let myself die. In pleading I take comfort." Elsewhere, "I know knights who come to harm by courting ladies more than the ladies court them,for they have no other power; when it happens that a lady loves, she should certainly plead with a knight [in love] if she sees excellence and good service in him." Finally, "I deem myself rewarded by my faith, when I make love-pleas to you, for this is right for me."" Each of these examples affirms the presence of a transforming irony whereby the unrequited or ill-rewarded lady-like her masculine counterpart-will endure and prevail because of her qualities of heart and mind. The dramatic quality closely approaches the Ovid of the Heroides. 12 Here, however, we find the important difference that the poem refers not only to a specific case but also to a posited system. That bond between the poem and its hierarchical matrix is heightened by the performative character of troubadour lyric; the poem is in a very real sense the courtship itself. It is the matter of the value assigned by society to their respective actions that nurtures the asymmet- rical relations a poem projected between the courting man and the courting woman. Since the beloved lady was the apex of value for the male, her transposition to activity does not imply a concomitant transposition of the passive male to perfection. In none of the women's poems, there- fore, does the masculine beloved appear to incarnate or substitute, as she had, for a total scheme of ideals.

The trobairitz avail themselves abundantly of the topos which equates the strength of love with the efficacy of the song: "E s'ieu faill ab motz verais,/ d'Aurenga mi moc l'esglais,/ per qu'ieu m'estauc esbaida [if I fail in true words it is that fear comes to me from Orange, which makes me stand stupefied]," writes Azalais.l3 Castelloza begins a love song, "Ja de chantar non degr'aver talan./ quar on mais chan,/ e pieitz mi vai d'amor ... [I should not wish to sing now, for the more I sing, the worse it goes for me in love]."14 Again, Clara d'Anduza: "... quan ieu cug chantar/ planh e sospir, per qu'ieu no puesc so far/ ab mas coblas que.1 cors complir volria ... [When I think I'm singing I actually weep and lament, for I cannot do with my verses what my heart would wish]."15 It is not surprising to find the troubadour topic of the unity of love, composition, and song invoked only by its opposite; the poems make constant reference to a preceding store of amatory discourse. However, they constitute an additional level of negation within a concentric scheme of levels of

11. Schultz-Gora, pp. 12-13; italics mine. 12. In a forthcoming article in L'Esprit createur I contend that Ovid's Heroides, which

were known and read in the south of France during the twelfth century, constitute a major source of elements of both male and female Provencal poets.

13. Schultz-Gora, p. 14. 14. Ibid., p. 23. 15. Ibid., p. 26.

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negativity. Whereas troubadour lyric as a whole proceeds from a negative stance on the part of the poet, it still held to the tenet of harmony between intention and accomplishment. The women's poems in their problematic relationship to external societal norms cannot lay claim to such an accomplishment.

Negation, reversal, sic-et-non, the argument in utramque partem are honored medieval modes of cognition from which the persistently anti- thetical stance of the male troubadour's lyric springs. This is expressed in his independence from the phenomena of nature and his marked indifference to obstacles physical and spiritual as well as in the play of far-and-near relationships within the poem. The types of negation to be discerned as prominent in the cansos of the trobairitz, however, are dom- inantly external to the poem: as women, they feel called upon to deploy linguistic strategies that describe them simultaneously as composers and as creatures overcome by greater force. The expressive strategies of the trobairitz include defense by axiom or sententia, which foregrounds the didactic function of the poem on a par with the dramatic one. The virtual lack of dense figural speech serves to point constantly at the codified elements of the poems, reminding us of their reversed context. While the near omipresence of apparent cliche presents the danger of attenuating the distinctiveness of the referent (and the concomitant dis- appearance of the beloved even as a virtual presence),16 it is the very habituality of cliches transposed to the new context that confers polemical force upon the poems. The content foregrounds conflict while the form makes appeal to the preexistent store of expectations, attempting to expand the boundaries offin' amor.

Against the background of the dazzling variety of Provencal love topics, the trobairitz narrow their choices to those which emanate from an agonistic stance. The four poems of the Countess of Dia are structured as complaints-against the faithlessness of a lover, the posited threats of her rivals, the evil of slanderers, and her own negligence of obligation. Castelloza's three poems find her pitted against both her lover and their slanderers, against ladies of higher rank, and against her husband. The fragment of Tibors's song is based on a repeated "never"-anc no fo, which entails a double-negative construction, preferred over the simple affirmative: I was never, she protests, without love for you, bels dous amics, never did I not remain constant, never did I have joy until you returned to me again.17 As a whole the poems affirm only by negation, whose pervasiveness eclipses even that of repetition.

The trobairitz demonstrate by omission their selection of those topoi

16. According to Paul Zumthor (Essai de poetique medievale [Paris: Seuil, 1972] and elsewhere), troubadour poetry would amount rather to a tissue of redundancies. The dominance of cliche, especially in the earlier generations, is not a feature to be taken for granted. More restricted and painstaking reading of the poems demonstrates their high degree of inventiveness and their variety in the use and adaption of topoi.

17. Schultz-Gora, p. 25.

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that foreground the essential paradox of their femininity as poets within a male system. For example, nowhere in their work does the principle of mezura (patience and discretion in the pursuit of love) appear as a cre- dential of their worth, as it generally does in troubadour lyric. This omission would seem to arise from a preference for depicting love only in terms of its most dramatic emotions. More important, however, the female lyricist does not emphasize mezura, because as the lady within the poem she remains essentially an object of pursuit and not a pursuing subject. By self-description the Countess of Dia retransforms herself into the courtly beloved, as if to resume a post only briefly vacated. Thus, when she demands of her beloved, "Cor.us tenrai en mon podor? [when will I hold you in my power?]," the question cannot evoke either the conventional lyrical myth of social regard for the lady or its obverse of sexual exploitation.

The didactic fervor that emanates from the Provencal canso as a whole gives preeminence to the assignment of praise and blame and, in so doing, makes the hypothesis of circumstances subordinate to the thesis of rules. Such description of persons as we find in cansos are always ad laudem or ad vituperium, and are, of course, most frequently encomiastic descriptions of the lady. The Countess of Dia has internalized this process; she reverses the description in praise of the beloved by applying it to herself: "vas lui no.m val merces ni cortesia/ ni ma beltatz ni mos pretz ni mos sens [with him neither pleading nor courtesy avails me, nor my beauty, my value, my mind!]."'8

The game offin'amor generates cases to be argued, judgments to be distributed, and, especially, rules to be established, sometimes by hypotheses, at other times through discursive polemic. Paramount among such rules are those that fix the status of the participants in the game, and it is within this order that the lively polemic of the ric ome (rich [powerful] man) is to be situated. That the lover and his lady were felt to be related as aspirant and ideal benefactress may explain the insistence, perhaps drawn from Ovid, on the absence of mercenary motives. Such motives in fact constitute the corpus delicti of offenses against love and occasion the insistence that a lady should never take a lover of a higher estate than her own. A woman who takes a great lord as her lover should be regarded as dead, declared Raimon de Miravel.19 "I know whence treachery comes," announced Bernart de Venbadern, "from those women who love for riches [per aver]."20 Again, "Ges amor segon ricor

18. Ibid., p. 18. 19. See Leslie Topsfield, Troubadours and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1974), pp. 219-37, for a discussion of this troubadour's contribution to the codifica- tion and diffusion of courtly ideals in the poetic generation 1180-1200.

20. Bernart de Ventadorn, "Chantars no pot gaire valer," cited in Bergin and Hill, p. 40, lines 23-25.

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non vai [love never goes according to power]." Andreas Capellanus, still too often cited as an auctoritas for troubadours, devoted a chapter of De amore to "Amor per pecuniam acquisito," demonstrating the degeneracy of mercenary females.21 These particular statements appear to envision only the contrast between selfless love and loveless greed on the lady's part. But the matter never turns on the ideological dangers of loving a too-powerful lady. Stresses attending the lover's position as aspirant are addressed and dealt with by Provencal genres other than the canso, such as the pastorela, where they often constitute a given. It would of course fall within the purview of such troubadours to advocate the eschewal of more powerful men, thereby reiterating their indispensability tofin' amor.

An aspirant had to speak to his lady from a state of submission, even vassalage, but when a vassal was also a powerful lord who could unmask himself and turn master, the status of the lady as the fixed standard of fin' amor could easily fall into doubt.

Raimbaut d'Aurenga, the scion of a reduced but old family, does take up the gauntlet to defend the amorous expertise of great lords: "I hear it said by most, and it displeases me, that a lady who deigns to hear the pleas of a powerful man is one who wants to destroy herself."22 The Dauphin d'Auvergne exchanges stanzas with the troubadour Perdigon, initiating the exchange himself on the side of the humble but deserving: "I know knights and barons who are ugly and felonous, and I know courteous men of low lineage who are generous and loyal and bold."23 The argument has loosed itself from its aspects of love against greed, or knight against cleric, as well as from the topos (as Curtius has it) of "nobility of soul,"24 and has edged near the question of the relative standing of the lovers. Giraut de Borelh takes the position that a great lord is a drutz a desonor (dishonoring lover) and quickly gets to the heart of the matter, which is advantage: "God help me, my lord, I think a lady who understands worth must not fall by making a king or emperor her lover; that's how it seems to me, for you, a surpassingly powerful man, would want no more than fleshlyjoy [No.n voletz mas lojauzimen]." And again, "You, powerful one, since you are the greater, demand bed first [Mas vos, ric, car etz plus maior/ Demandatz lo jazer primer]!"25 The entire process of patient, measured suppliancy and ascension is at stake, indeed,fin' amor itself as a proving ground of value. By no means do the

21. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. A. Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).

22. Raimbaut, "A mon vers dirai chanso," in Pattison, p. 171, lines 15-20. 23. Cited from Sakari, "Le Theme de lamour du ric ome au debut de la poesie pro-

ven4ale," Actes et memoires du III Congres international de langue et litterature d'oc (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1961), p. 90.

24. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), pp. 179-80.

25. Sakari, p. 93.

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poets agree, but they do reject the analogical break between social and spiritual factors.

One trobairitz, Azalais de Porcairagues, enters the fray on this question. In her single canso she declares that, against deprecation by others, she has chosen a lover "who is lord over all [que sobre totz seignoreia]," a man whose faithfulness gives them the lie. That statement is followed immediately, however, by a plea that her lover demand no outrage of her, a term properly interpreted in accounts of the poem as an untimely granting of sexual favor. She assures her lover that they will presently come to the test of love, when she will place herself at his merce. The plea is directed mainly to the lover's discretion and sense of timing, which may behave the more capriciously insofar as he is not the lady's social inferior.

The positions taken by women poets on this question are by no means identical; that is, for Azalais, self-restraint on the masculine side may counterbalance the sexual vulnerability of the female; for the Countess of Dia and Castelloza, the woman's heroism and defiance may overcome potential social disadvantage. None of the poets ignores the matter of hierarchical relations which bear directly upon fundamental tenets of courtly love: the nobility of the lover, the distance between lover and beloved, the exalting nature of the lover's devotion, and the social context of the love. Maria de Ventadorn, in a tenson with Gui d'Ussel, argues that the lady must be given a handicap, as it were: "The lover must beg for what he desires humbly, and the lady must accord it to him, but watch her timing carefully; and the lover must serve her as his lover and his lady; but a lady must honor her lover only as a friend, never as a lord [dompna deu a son drut far honor/ cum ad amic, mas non cum a seignor]."26 A seeming equality or, worse, a reversal of the hierarchical relations between lover and lady, then, points to her downfall. Imbalance favors the lady, mitigating the prior disadvantage arising from her sexuality. The argument is a variant of the Ovidian one, translated to the effect that the concepts of amics and seignors are fundamen- tally opposed. Yet we do not see this argument transposed to the masculine field; only the lady need take warning.

The trobairitz liberally employ, as do their masculine counterparts, the lexicon of feudalism tempered by that of economic exchange, con- noting the status of a love relation as a kind of pact and a means of exchange.27 The frequency of terms in Provencal love lyrics that derive from recently constituted codes of mercantile economics is striking, no less so because they had already entered the vocabulary of feudalism by

26. Schultz-Gora: "Gui d'Ussel, be.m pesa de vos," p. 21, lines 17-24. 27. See Eugene Vance, "Love's Concordance: The Poetics of Desire and the Joy of the

Text," Diacritics 5, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 40-52, for the interplay of economic and amorous

language of exchange in the poems of the trouvere Gace Brule; also Georges Duby, "Re-

marques sur la litterature genealogique en France au XIe et au XIIe siecles," inHommes et structures du moyen dge (Paris: Mouton, 1973), pp. 287-98.

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the twelfth century: talan, desire or will, from the Roman talentum, a measure of precious metal; pretz, value, from pretium, worth, wages, reward; guaridon (guiderdon), from a Germanic widarlon, the value of a service, a remuneration; arichir, to enrich or make powerful; merce, which includes along with the notion of grace those of salary and price; en balansa, "in suspense or perplexity,"28 from the concept of balances or scales; the very aspect ofseignoratge,29 the noble's privilege of exacting a percentage of the coins struck from metals brought to his mint; along with the feudal bailia, power or bailiffship. These terms are all utilized by the trobairitz. Although certain women in positions of power indeed have male vassals, the meaning of these terms of the erotic lexicon becomes ambiguous in a context that inverts the canonical relationship of woman to man. The Countess of Dia asks her beloved when she will be able to hold him "in her power [en mon poder]": the semantic context makes the use of power clearly different from the poder or seignoratge or bailia in which the lady conventionally holds the heart of her admirer: here it is sexual power, unadorned by social advantage. The pragmatic polyva- lence of the lexicon opens out the semantic import of terms: onor (honor) is also the fief which might be the reward of good service;30 it is also the reward of love-service, insistently evoking the register to which it otherwise belongs. In the trobairitz, the language of feudalism and of mercan- tilism is abstracted to a further remove from analogical social relations outside of the poem. The panoply of courtly virtues can apply little; whereas in the case of male poetry we may profitably perceive a parallel between acceptance by the beloved and the achievement of courtly ideals, the bond is seriously weakened to the detriment of possibilities available to a woman poet. The reduction of the cognitive function raises the question of the function that poems of the trobairitz might have assumed in their environment. Even as they hold to the epistemic model of fin' amor, we perceive that their songs could scarcely conserve the value of a key to a unified system of solidary values.

In view of the partial secession from communal experiences that is evidenced in these polemical cansos, we have to entertain the possibility that the poems did not depend (as much as did those of troubadours and especially those of professionals who lived by their art) on the public projection of a self. All the trobairitz composed after 1170, most after the turn of the thirteenth century. We have to ask whether they were not in more than the obvious sense the beneficiaries of the written text. The ethical stance adopted by the poets testifies to the increasing cross- pollination from genre to genre, this, too, doubtless abetted by a pro- liferation of reading. The trobairitz may well have composed in such a

28. I have translated this definition from F. Raynouard, Lexique roman (Paris: Sil- vestre, 1836), 2:172.

29. Georges Duby, Guerriers et paysans (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 36. 30. See Rita M. Lejeune, "Formules fiodales et style amoureux chez Guillaume IX

d'Aquitaine," Studi romanzi 27 (1946): 227-48.

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way that their effectiveness could be independent of the conditions of performance.

While we are not to conceive of all performances as necessarily "public" performances in the contemporary sense of the word, or of remuneration as a necessary aim of performance, it is noteworthy that no trobairitz explicitly addresses any sort of public. No poem opens with an invocation of courtly ambiance; only one, that of Azalais, has the conventional nature-opening that generally announces a love song to its audience. The female poem is envisioned chiefly as mediator between the lover and the absent beloved, but one poet, Castelloza, shows herself impatient with the obstruction defined by the poem's insistent media- tion: "I do not send this," she declares, "but tell it to you myself [Ieu mezeissa.us o dic]."31 Of the ten lyrics, four are addressed exclusively and specifically to the beloved. There every strophe contains the vocative amics (or vos, with reference to him). All the poems but one (Azalais's) contain a direct address to him. The poems that diverge from this stance are all by the Countess of Dia: one poem does not include a specific address, in another the beloved is addressed intermittently, while in the two others he is addressed only in the tornada, or envoi.

In the tornada we generally look for dedication or address of the canso to a patron or beloved, or a pairing of these in one or two tornadas. In the mention of a patron we would discover a sign of a secondary character who functions within the system of the poem as an arbiter of its excellence. Five of the trobairitz's poems end simply in a final plea to the beloved. Another turns from such a plea to an apostrophe of the song itself.32 Only two of the ten lyrics (Azalais's and one of Castelloza)33 include an address to a recipient in addition to the beloved. Both of these are apparently noble women; Azalais's addressee is generally taken to be the powerful Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne.34 It is of course extremely common to find cansos dedicated to patronesses; it is more striking in the case of trobairitz that no poem is dedicated to a masculine patron. Apart from the implication that the outer audience (distin- guished from the beloved) seems sharply reduced, the dedication to women may be a sign of the growing medieval interest in composing "for the ladies"; the trend will reach Dante, when he destines the canso that becomes the pivotal point of his Vita nuova to ladies "who have intellec- tion of love."35

Even in the sole instance that finds Castelloza claiming a wider public value for her song-that of making known the qualities of her beloved-the theme of praise slides immediately into polemic, dem-

31. Schultz-Gora, p. 13. 32. These are Comtessa de Dia, Schultz-Gora, p. 18; Castelloza's three songs, pp.

23-25; and Clara d'Anduza, p. 26. 33. Comtessa de Dia, Schultz-Gora, p. 18. 34. Azalais, Schultz-Gora, p. 17; Castelloza, ibid., p. 24. 35. Dante Vita nuova 18-19.

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onstrating the impossibility of elevating praise of a masculine beloved to a paradigmatic status within the system of courtly love. A further absence is to be noted, with particular regard to abortive praise: it is that of the senhal, the pseudonymic sign by which the troubador designated his addressee. None of the poems but one contains a senhal, and this senhal is not the representation of a trait possessed by the beloved, but "Bels Noms" (beautiful name).

The departure from the general convention of the senhal constitutes in itself a mark of unconventionality. And unconventionality in the cansos of the trobairitz, as I suggested earlier, proceeds mainly by omission. The inherent self-deprivation of epic topoi, the gravitation toward other poetic systems such as that of romance, whence other topics could be derived and adapted, the lack of solid self-identification through the beloved, all call for a reinterpretation of the poem as a new production. There is of course no lack of play between conventions abolished and conventions retained.

The adaptation of the repertoire of amorous topoi-viewable perhaps as "instruments of production"-by women poets, corroborates the existence during the high Middle Ages of a system offin' amor. As aggressive statements by women "lovers," the poems function as a link between the paradigmatic courtly lyric and the heightened descriptive freedoms of the contemporary narrative genres. Their dramatization of love's constancy under fire, fidelity in absence, courtship and recourtship sets in relief the particular degree of tension of the complementary cultural imperatives confronting the poets: the impulse to conserve (along with their male counterparts) and the impulse to deny.

The concomitant polemic in which nearly all the women poets engage themselves, their stress on negativity, bring us well past the task of collection and description, past the constatation of how courtly love- revealed by dialectic as a system-functions as a constituent of art ob- jects, past the consideration of the poems as instruments of self- knowledge or testing, to the points of fundamental tension, opposition, and resolution that mark off the love songs of these medieval women. We cannot reduce poetry to its own discourse alone, but are compelled to admit the importance of the relations that unite poetic superstructure to social infrastructures. We cannot but take note, however, of the cultural values buried and taken for granted in these women's poems, as well as of those values contested, and of the adaptation from the language of fuedal and mercantile exchange. The poems of the trobairitz deal with levels of subordination that engage and challenge the avowed identity of singer and song on the frontiers of traditional usage but certainly fall within the encompassing realm where eros and language commingle.

Department of Italian Language and Literature Yale University



the provençal trobairitz and the limits of courtly love

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