1718
Elisabeth Ferrand, left behind a phenomenal scientific legacy on Feb 17, about which you can read much more on the Ancien Régime page of "Woman-Blindness"
1661
The death of Jules,
Hunting for more background to the Trobairitz (see Jan 13), I found, on the Library of Congress' website - not quite as comprehensive a collection of world literature as the British Library's, but getting there - what looked like a fascinating book by one Tanya Stabler Miller, which gave me several names that I mistook for Trobairitz, but who turned out to be equally but very differently intellectually sophisticated: "The Beguines of Mediaeval Paris".
"In the thirteenth century," so the book's PR-blurb informs us, "Paris was the largest city in Western Europe, the royal capital of France, and the seat of one of Europe's most important universities. In this vibrant and cosmopolitan city, the Beguines, women who wished to devote their lives to Christian ideals without taking formal vows, enjoyed a level of patronage and esteem that was uncommon among like communities elsewhere. Some Parisian Beguines owned shops and played a vital role in the city's textile industry and economy. French royals and nobles financially supported the Beguinages, and university clerics looked to the Beguines for inspiration in their pedagogical endeavors. The Beguines of Medieval Paris examines these religious communities and their direct participation in the city's commercial, intellectual, and religious life. Drawing on an array of sources, including sermons, religious literature, tax rolls, and royal account books, Tanya Stabler Miller contextualizes the history of Parisian Beguines within a spectrum of lay religious activity and theological controversy. She examines the impact of women on the construction of medieval clerical identity, the valuation of women's voices and activities, and the surprising ways in which local networks and legal structures permitted women to continue to identify as Beguines long after a church council prohibited the Beguine status. Based on intensive archival research, "The Beguines of Medieval Paris" makes an original contribution to the history of female religiosity and labor, university politics and intellectual debates, royal piety, and the central place of Paris in the commerce and culture of medieval Europe."
Women's Lib in a haute couture habit! Feminism in the city square not the abbey cloister, but with a crucifix for a necklace. No surprise the male church authorities eventually got scared and shut it down!
But still religious, committedly, even evangelically religious, which tends to put me off. And yet... using the Lib of Cong search-bar to see what else there might be, I then found "The Wisdom of the Beguines" by Laura Swan, and again not the whole book (though you can reserve it and read it in situ if you happen to be in the area), but just the PR-blurb:
"The Beguines began to form in various parts of Europe over eight hundred years ago, around the year 1200. Beguines were laywomen, not nuns, and thus did not take solemn vows and did not live in monasteries. The Beguines were a phenomenal movement that swept across Europe, yet they were never a religious order or a formalised movement. But there were common elements that rendered these women distinctive and familiar, including their common way of life, their unusual business acumen, and their commitment to the poor and marginalised. These women were essentially self-defined, in opposition to the many attempts to control and define them. They lived by themselves, or together in so-called Beguinages, which could be single houses for as few as a handful of Beguines or, as in Brugge and Amsterdam, walled-in rows of houses (enclosing a central court with a chapel) where over a thousand Beguines might live - a village of women within a medieval town or city. And each region of Europe has its own Beguine stories to tell. Among the Beguines were celebrated spiritual writers and mystics, including Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrijs of Nazareth, Hadewijch of Brabant, and Marguerite Porete, who was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake in Paris in 1310. She was not the only Beguine suspected of heresy, and often politics were the driving force behind such charges. Certain clerics defended Beguines against charges of heresy, while other women had to go undercover by joining a Benedictine or Cistercian monastery. Amazingly, many Beguine communities survived for a long time despite oppression, wars, the plague, and other human and natural disasters. Beguines lived through - and helped propel - times of great transition and reform. Beguines courageously spoke to power and corruption, never despairing of God's compassion for humanity. They used their business acumen to establish and support ministries that extended education, health care, and other social services to the vulnerable. And they preached and taught of a loving God who desired a relationship with each individual person while calling to reform those who used God's name for personal gain. What strength of spirit protected the lives of these women and their beguinages? What can we learn from them? What might they teach us? The Beguines have much to say to our world today. This book invites us to listen to their voices, to discover them anew."
Marie de France is
either a nom de plume or a name imposed by posterity because it knew no other.
She lived between 1160 and 1215, but in England not her native France, and left
behind a wealth of poetry as well as translations that show off her proficiency
in Latin and Middle English, northern Franchois (the difference between Langue
d’Oc and Langue d’Oil, hers the latter, but in a specifically Francien, which
is to say Parisian dialect), and also Breton, which may well suggest that Marie
de France is a cultural and geographical misnomer.
A familiar of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, who was queen of most of the regions where those languages were
spoken, she stands out in an age where women’s education was little more than
counting rosary beads as proof of numeracy, and reading the text of the Ave Maria
as proof of literacy, as one of the most highly educated and creative women of
her time, of whose poetry the best remembered are “The Lais of Marie de
France”, one half of a collection known somewhat less poetically as “British
Library MS Harley 978”.
“The Lais” - which are
a form of Breton verse that she rendered rather more sophisticated - appear in
the aftermath of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s vast pseudo-history, the reduction of
Celtic mythology to tales of imaginary kings and queens, with courtly romance
to make them loveable, but as humans now, no longer as gods, and their priests
reduced to mere wizards. It caught on, and completed the process of
power-assumption by the church in all the Celtic lands of Europe.
Dame Marie, as her
number one rival of the day Denis Piramus nicknamed her, wrote her tales of
chivalry and romance in Franchois, claiming that they were translations from
the Latin, though no source is cited, and evidence within the text makes clear
that she had made the tales up. They were presented “in your honour noble
king”, which can only have been Henry II of England, because it was in his
court that she was residing, but it wasn’t a single copy made for him - the
Harley 978 document in the British Library is actually rather dull, unlike the
copy of the same work held in Paris, which is decorated with the illustration
(and yes, those are genuine gold shavings) pasted at the top of this blog-page.
The other works known
to have been condemned to the library of oblivion (well, had you heard of her?
do you know anyone who has?) but still findable if you search hard enough, are:
* Still more “Lais” (including the Arthurian
works Chevrefueil and Lanval)
* a translation of
Aesop's Fables from Middle English into French
* St. Patrick's
Purgatory (also known as The Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick), which of
course is the other end of the Geoffrey of Monmouth undertaking, the
non-Arthurian pseudo-history, because Eirish mythology was not identical to
that of the other Celtic groups and so had to be dismantled differently.
*
The Trobairitz
Provence, around the year 1130, in that area of southern France which, like southern Italy,
virtually all of Spain and Portugal, and most of the islands of the central and
western Mediterranean, were under the cultural even more than the political
control of the Moors, the Moslems, and thereby Arabia. It is the reason for
flamenco music, which came from the Spanish development of the ud into the
guitar; it is the reason for the sonnet, which was brought to Italy by Immanuel
Giudeo from Andalusia and taught in Florence to Durante degli Alighieri. And
put all those together in one art-form, it is also the reason for the birth of
the Troubadours and the Trobairitz.
The first, on this list anyway, is
Na Tibors si era una dompna de proensa dun castel d'En Blancatz que a nom sarrenom. Cortesa fo et enseignada. Auinens e fort maistra e saup trobar. E fo enamorada e fort amada per amor, e per totz los bos homes daquela encontrada fort honrada, e per totas las ualens dompnas mout tensuda e mout obedida. E felz aquestas coblas e mandet las al seu amador. Bels dous amics ben uos puesc en uer dir.
Na Tibors was a lady of Provence, from a castle of En Blacatz called Sarenom. She was courtly and accomplished, gracious and very wise. And she knew how to write poems. And she fell in love and was fallen in love with, and was greatly honored by all the good men of that region, and admired and respected by all the worthy ladies.
Like
all the Joni Mitchells of their day, the Trobairitz always composed the music as
well as writing the udics or guitarics (they didn’t call them lyrics because they
didn’t use lyres), and I mention Joni because the other thing known about
Tibors was that she was, shall I call it, a Freeman in Provence. In Joni’s
version “I felt unfettered and alive, no one calling me up for favours, no
one’s future to decide”; Tibors is known, from a ballad written some years
after her death, to have served as a judge on whatever they called The
P-for-Provence Factor, or was it Celebrity Come Troubadouring, on at least one
occasion.
Of
her own work, alas, only one canso survives, and only the words, no music,
though later composers have volunteered their own arrangements of one of them: "Bels
dous amics" here, "Bel dos amic" here
The
fragment of surviving text reads:
Bels
dous amics, ben vos posc en ver dir
que
anc non fo qu'ieu estes ses desir
pos
vos conven que us tene per fin aman;
ni
anc no fo qu'ieu non agues talan,
bels
dous amics, qu'ieu soven no us vezes;
ni
anc no fo sazons que m'en pentis,
ni
anc no fo, se vos n'anes iratz,
qu'ieu
agues joi tro que fosetz tornatz;
ni
[anc]. . .
which in contemporary English would be something like:
Sweet,
handsome friend, I can tell you truly
that
I have never been without desire
since
the day it pleased you that I took you as my courtly lover;
Nor
has a moment ever arisen, sweet, handsome friend,
when
I didn't want to see you often.
Nor
have I ever felt regret,
nor
has it ever come to pass, if you stormed off in a temper,
that
I felt a moment’s joy till your return.
Nor
[but
now the text is damaged] ...
My thanks to https://kamurley.wordpress.com/tag/tibors-de-sarenom/ for much of this information
*
The other poems still in existence are: "Ab joi et ab joven m’apais", "Estât ai en greu cossirier", and "Fin ioi me don’alegranssa", and while the flutics are what you would expect from a love song (please be mine, o but I love you, please don't leave me, now that you're gone), the music is actually what makes the flutic interesting, and I mean the music of the words as well as the accompaniment: lots of what are called "coblas singulars" and "coblas doblas" - the easiest way to understand this is to compare the original studio version of Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" with the "Live at Budokan" version, and count how many internal rhymes he manages to add to each line on the latter. Very hard to do. Singulars uses an ab’ ab’ b’ aab’ rhyme scheme, but keeps on changing the a'; doblas simply doubles it, and therefore changes the a' rhyme twice. I am tempted to try to rewrite this explanation in a manner that role-models it, but I fear it is beyond my capabilities. I have created a jpg instead and you can follow it there:
Still in the same time-period, our next is Maria de Ventadorn, born in Limousin around 1165, the daughter of Ramon II, Viscount of Turenne, which was one of the four vis-counties of the region. She was married to Ebles V of the neighboring viscounty of Ventadorn, somewhere in her middle teens, which meant that she became the patroness-by-default of one of the centres of troubadour culture: among the ones she personally patronaged were Pons de Capdoill, the Monk of Montaudon, Savaric de Mauleon, Guiraut de Calanson, Gaucelm Faidit and Gui d’Ussel, all of whom, as was the custom, dedicated songs to her.... [the rest of this you have to pay to read, but I promise you it’s worth it: click here.
But she didn't just patronage, she also wrote, of which her poem "Gui d'Ussel be m pesa de vos" is a debate with her protegé about the nature of love:
Dompna, so es plaitz vergoignos
Ad ops de dompna razonar
Que cellui non teigna per par
A cui a faich un cor de dos
O vos diretz, e no us estara gen,
que l drutz la deu amar plus finamen
O vos diretz q'il son par entre lor,
Que ren no il deu drutz mas qant per amor
which translates into English as
It's truly a disgrace to argue
That a lady's greater than
The man who loves her, lady, when
She has fashioned one heart from two.
You must either say that the man exceeds
The lady in love (scant praise), or else concede
That with respect to honour they're the same:
The lover only owes what bears love's name.
I can't help but wonder what the Spice Girls might make of that.
* Why Jan 13 really? Because the page is otherwise empty in this blog and I want to fill it. Because Jan is the first month, and they were the first of their kind in history, and 13 was the century in which it happened. Will that do?
