Between love and law: Feudal vocabulary in medieval Catalan and Valencian courtly love lyric

Abstract

The use of feudal vocabulary is the most innovative feature of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitan troubadour love lyric. The Catalan and Valencian poets who continued and reworked this tradition over the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries preserved this convention with varying degrees of fi delity. The aim of this paper is to identify trends in the use of feudal vocabulary in the works of Catalan and Valencian poets, and to interpret these tendencies in the light of contemporary historic developments. The poets’ choices in selecting materials from the previous tradition provide valuable information about their strategies of adaptation to the requirements of their audiences. This analysis will allow delimitating similarities and differences between classical troubadour lyric and the works of later Catalan and Valencian poets, an essential step towards the defi nition of Catalan poetry in the late Middle Ages. The specifi c identity of this poetic expression has yet to be outlined, since it has traditionally been described in the context of disparaging comparisons with other earlier and contemporary poetic traditions.