"Iratz-Jauzens me faytz trobar": Sad-Happiness in the Troubadour Cansos

Abstract

:It is generally accepted that the troubadour cansos were written according to a template and thus not meant to be understood autobiographically. Nevertheless, I argue that the troubadours employed a lexicon of affective polysemy that was not exclusively performative but, rather, was meant to elicit a real emotional response within their audience. Drawing from affect theory and particularly Rosenwein's definition of emotional communities, I study the polysemous words joi and ira and show how they represent opposite yet complementary emotions in the troubadour cansos. I demonstrate how these two complements together form a sad-happy spectrum evident not just in the emotion words' connotations but in their movement in and out of troubadour lyrics in what I refer to as the joi-ira cycle.