Lost Literature of the Troubadours: A Proposed Catalogue

Abstract

LOST LITERATURE OF THE TROUBADOURS: A PROPOSED CATALOGUE* The time has come to begin inventorying the lost literature of the troubadours. In the last 40 years, attention has been paid to lost works in Latin, medieval English and Portuguese, and to the lost literatures of medieval Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland. In 1995, Alan Deyermond brought a 20-yearproject to fruition by publishingEpicayromance, first volume ofLiteratura perdida de la Edad media castellana. The catalogue oflost troubadour literature proposed here will track lost names, lost poems, lost manuscripts, attributions of anonymous poems, known fragments, new discoveries, and critical literature relevant to all the above. More than ten years ago, Charles Faulhaber, a member of Deyermond's original team of Hispanists, presented a talk entitled "Lost Literature of Medieval Spain?" at the Modern Language Association convention. The question mark in that title referred, not to works known to be lost or to the processes of loss—heretical content, insects, fire, water, earthquake, war—but rather to a number of factors by which works come to be lost to the scholarly community, including simple failure to edit. In sum, texts that are not studied, for whatever reason, are texts that are lost. Faulhaber paid close attention to the very definition of what constitutes a literary work. Many texts are simply defined out of existence as literary works, he found, arguing convincingly that the ensemble of written attestation—including religious and sapiential texts, historical and medical treatises, translations, administrative texts, legal texts, and charters—must be considered if literary texts are not to be "decontextualized." Within the Occitan domain, troubadour poetry, with its prestige and visibility, constitutes a natural starting point for a project that will eventually expand to include lost medieval Occitan writings ofall types. Why undertake the Zen-like task of documenting what is no longer extant—what we know we don't know about the troubadours? To KATHRYN KLINGEBIEL paraphrase Richard Wilson, the cataloguingoflost medieval literatures, even as it yields linguistic and literary benefits to specialists in various disciplines, should eventually contribute to a truer picture ofthe growth and development of medieval Western European civilization. Thecanon ofOld Provençal verse, and the manuscripts/chansonniers which form its core, have benefitted from successive updatings, attributions , reconstitutions, and discoveries. To this day, troubadour poems, including fragments and citations in other works, are described by their Pillet-Carstens inventory number; faithful to the alphabetized and numbered list of troubadours published by Karl Bartsch (1872), the work of Alfred Pillet was continued by Henry Carstens, who brought it from 1909 to 1931. More recently, István Frank (1953-1957) and others have considerably updated this indispensable repertory, e.g., Zufferey 1987 (359-360) names 10 chansonniers that have been rediscovered or recognized since Bartsch's Grundriss. Extant manuscriptsarecodedaccordingtoJeanroy 1916and Brunei 1935. Lostmanuscripts aretrackedby referencetoCamilleChabaneau's 1886 inventory; this work was updated by Anglade (1916) and, in 1971, by Chambers. These dates speak to the clear need for a new centralized listing that will collect and collate all work done in recent years. In France the discovery ofthe troubadours took place only in the late 16th century, when Jean de Nostredame published his Vies des plus célèbres et ancienspoètesprovençaux (1575). Thecanon ofOld Provençal lyric began to take shape as early as the first decade ofthe 14th century in Italy, where poets and commentators developed the lyric tradition of the troubadours. Francesco da Barberino's Documenti was completed ca. 1310; only in 1640 did Francesco Ubaldini edit and enrich the anthology with additional poems and vidas, as well as commentaries, translations into Latin, and a table of contents. A learned Italian of the 16th century, Giovanni Maria Barbieri, collected and published old manuscripts and collections oftroubadour LOST LITERATURE OF THE TROUBADOURS writings. His Libro dell'arte del rimare, written in 1581, was published only in 1790, under the title Dell'origine della poesia rimata; Barbieri owned originals or copies of4 chansonniers, now generally thought to be lost but which, in some cases, contained materials available nowhere else. Not only treatises on poetry but also anthologies have added to our knowledge of troubadour lyric. In the 18th century, Crescimbeni included in his history of...