"Conven," "Costuma" and "Dreit" in the Code of "Fin'Amor"

Abstract

"Conven," "Costuma" and "Dreit" in the Code of "Fin'Amor" Eliza Miruna Ghil Introduction My present study deals with three legal terms used in Old Occitan, and with their poetic usage in the troubadours' code of "fin'amor." This study is part of a larger research project centered on the legal imagery of the troubadours as used in their love songs, a project to which the recent publication of the edition of the Costuma d'Agen by F.R.P. Akehurst has given a renewed impetus. The Costuma d'Agen, as edited, translated and commented by Akehurst, represents an important document, of great significance for all the scholars engaged in research on medieval Occitania. The editing is masterful, the translation superb, and the critical apparatus authored by the editor both highly erudite and full of insights. The legal document published by Professor Akehurst (the "Livre juratoire")1 constitutes a text of 37 pages in Old Occitan in his edition. An English translation of similar length accompanies the original on the opposite page. The document sheds light on life in medieval Occitania in the thirteenth century, during a period up to and slightly posterior to the conclusion of the Albigensian Crusade (1230). The Costuma sheds light on various aspects of daily life, from economic relations, e.g., the salt and wine trade, property ownership and debt payments, to social relations, e.g., those between the councilmen of Agen and their overlord or between the citizens of Agen and outsiders, and to military matters, e.g., the duty to provide military service. The Costuma further deals with matters of law enforcement, such as details on transgressions and retributions, mostly in the form of fines, in cases of thefts of property, homicides, and-in the fun-to-read Chapter 19-adultery. We also get information on judicial duels, and notaries and the fees due them. The version of the Costuma d'Agen made now available to us constitutes a great read in itself and by itself, and a read that provides us with an invaluable glimpse into the Occitan society at that point in time, and at the grass-roots level. [End Page 52] For my part, I approached that legal document with an agenda of my own: i.e., not as a historian or as a legal expert, interested mainly in the reality of the period to which the document belongs, but rather as an analyst of poetry and poetic language who has set out to study a monument of language in order to ferret out some connotations of legal terms of which the troubadours may have made poetic use with various degrees of originality. A comparison would thus take shape between the semantic nuances and connotations of the legal terms figuratively used by the poets/composers in their love songs, and the connotations of those terms that emerge while seeing them placed in the context of actual legal procedures and laws. The main thrust of my larger project has been an attempt to map out the legal vocabulary as used in love songs by selected troubadours, and to analyze the image-making based on it, with a de-emphasis, by and large, on the feudal imagery, an area that I consider as only one variant thereof, and a variant abundantly studied with great subtlety in the previous scholarship on the troubadours. At the conclusion of the project, we ought to reach a clearer characterization of the contribution made by some major troubadours to the crystallization of what scholars have called the "code of 'fin'amor"' (Lazar, Amour courtois, 25), with its "guidelines" and "requirements" (Lazar, "Fin'amor," 67). We might also be able to claim that, contrary to a certain perception of the medieval times as a period when "might was right," the idea of a law equitable to all parties could be envisioned, at least in matters of the heart, and in song. I shall concentrate, in the present essay, on three major troubadours, and on their use of the three legal terms mentioned in the title. Troubadours and Legal Vocabulary I. The Three Troubadours I have completed up to now an in-depth study from the viewpoint stated above...