The women in question are known in French as The Trobairitz - the female equivalents of Troubadours, from the word “trobar,” which in the Provençal language means “to compose” - though in fact I am going to start with one who was not, who precded them by many decades, but without whom they are unlikely to have been.
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
Where exactly Sarenom was located is not known, but a document in the Vatican Library tells us that it was one of the castles in the domain of Blacatz, who the French today remember as Blacas de Blacas III (1165–1237): he was the feudal lord of Aups, himself a troubadour and the father of another, Blacasset, and the man about whom another troubadour, Sordello, wrote the most curious “planh” (eulogy), inviting the kings of his time to share and eat the heart of Blacatz and thus acquire a portion of his courage.
That document (“Vida” of Tibors from "Troubadour manuscript H, an anonymous Lombard chansonnier, now Latin 3207" in the Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome) tells us that:
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
*
Her song "A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria", written in the Occitan language, is the only canso by a Trobairitz to have survived with its music intact: it can be found in "Le manuscript di roi", a collection of songs copied around 1270 for Charles of Anjou, the brother of Louis IX.
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.
She was able to do this, in part, because she had been brought up at the Parisian court, where her father was the personal secretary and the astrologer to King Charles V (which sounds like he both made the tea and read the tea-leaves afterwards, but I think it was something more seniorly civil service than just that). But it also helped that, in this epoch of the Troubadours, she had written, and shared publicly, some of the most splendid poetry and love ballads dedicated to her husband, Etienne du Castel; so they knew how talented she was, how supportive he had been, and were keen to maintain that encouragement, especially as her father had died in the same year.
All of her writings assail the same themes, reducable to the label “feminist” if you insist: she traces the historical sources of the subjugation of women through their lack of education, through different expectations of behaviour for men and women by society, and she fights back, not using the word “misogynistic”, because that would have come across as hostile and she always maintained the highest levels of Christian virtue and morality in order to ensure she offered no excuse for censure, let alone the censoring, of her work. But she advocated for women’s rights by demonstrating female accomplishments, and offered idealistic visions of a more equal and therefore a more harmonious and therefore a much better world. Difficult to argue or denounce when presented quite that cleverly by someone expert in the use of rhetoric! Difficult, but managed, as you will read shortly.
Two works in particular stand out:
“Le Dit de la Rose” - “The Tale of the Rose” - appeared in 1402. First Guillaume de Lorris, then, forty years after he died leaving it unfinished, Jean de Meung, had written the most beloved romance of the era, the apotheosis of courtly love, “Le Romance de la Rose”, part of the effort of the church to reduce the pre-Christian gods to human status, while still allowing them to be admired. Her book responds to it, showing in true literary-critical manner, citing text and deconstructing it, how this perception of the world denounced women as seducers, while simultaneously heroising the satyriatic men: not that she ever said “satyriatic” overtly, but the inference of “vulgar”, “immoral”, and even “slanderous to women” runs through her text. She later published “Letters on the Debate of the Rose” as a follow-up to the controversy she had happily engendered.
The other truly major work was “Le Tresor de la Cité des Dames” (“The Book of the City of Ladies”), which came out three years later, in 1405. Today it is regarded as “the earliest known work on women's history by a woman”, a statement that must itself be regarded as unacceptably eurocentric, and probably christocentric too. Written in the form of an allegorical poem, it “revises masculine traditions” (isn’t that just the loveliest way of phrasing it! not mine, it belongs, like the previous quote, to Maureen Quilligan in a splendid book called “The Allegory of Female Authority”).
Three “ladies,” introduced as Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, discuss the oppression of women and the misogynistic subject matter and language used by contemporary male writers. Guided by the author, they establish a city of their own, inhabited exclusively by women of acknowledged virtue, women who, as she phrases it, “have worldly prudence in regulating their lives well, each according to her estate... to love honour and the blessings of a good reputation”.
Both of these books brought her to the indignant attention of the scholar Jean de Montreuil, which potentially put her entire career in jeopardy, because Montreuil was a man with clout. He had been the leader of a group of intellectual male chauvinists who invoked the “Lex Salica” to ensure there could never be a woman, or even somebody descended from a previous sovereign through the female line, on the throne of France or its domains. And there was Christine de Pizan, arguing the very opposite.
But then, in 1399, despite being exiled for life by England’s Richard II just two years earlier, Henry Bolingbroke became King Henry IV of England. Henry had been born in Lancashire in April 1367; his parents were cousins: his father John of Gaunt (that should be Ghent but we Aenglisch never could pronounce the Fronsay properly), was the third surviving son of Edward III, which gave Bolingbroke a genuine claim, but very distant, and several people in the line before him: his mother, on the other hand, was a direct descendant of Henry III, and this was Bolingbroke’s case for his legitimacy. Oh, and by the way, during his years of travel, both before and after exile, Bolingbroke had become one of the formal patrons of...Christine de Pizan. Henry, just to complete the tale and to explain why I am telling it, was never recognised as a legitimate monarch by Charles VI of France. Montreuil 1 - de Pizan 0.
No, that is unfair. 2 - 1 perhaps, because she achieved a number of significant victories in her campaign for equal womanhood, even if it has taken another thousand years to start to get there. In the centuries following her death she continued to crop up as a footnote in the bibliography section of an occasional PhD thesis, and did even find her way into the indices of several male-dominated encyclopedia, though never outside France. And even then it was not for the poetry or the rhetorical brilliance, but simply as a nuisance, with phrases like “she was among the first women to engage in the Querelle des Femmes (“the so-called Women Question” is how that is usually mistranslated), which discuss a woman's nature and status from a philosophical standpoint...”
I have left three dots, but really there is only one. Three dots implies that you will now go on and identify the content, the argument, the conclusions. A full-stop confirms that you won’t. And history for the past 900 years hasn’t bothered, so why should you?
In 1418, growing old and her children now grown up and therefore not needing her, she entered a convent in Poissy, just northwest of Paris, where she spent her final years composing an exquisite poem entitled “Le Ditie de Jeanne d’Arc” (usually translated simply as “Song in Honour of Joan of Arc”, but this is where we get the word “ditty” from, and it is much serious than the way we use it), completed in 1429, the year before she died. More on Joan of Arc on May 30, and by extraordinary coincidence you will also find there one of the greatest of the Troubadours, Arnaut Daniel, with a link to his biography and not only his works but those of many-many-many of the Troubadours.
* 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?
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