BOTH BORROWERArVD LENDER: CULTURALEXCHANGE IN THE WORLD OFTHE TROUBADOURS Neither a borrowernora lender be; For toanoft losesboth itselfand friend, Andborrowingdullstheedgeofhusbandry. This above all: to thine own selfbe true___ Polorriusto Laertes, Hamlet, I.iii Medieval intertextualitygavethe lie to Polonius, with his Renaissance conception ofthe autonomous self. Medieval poets participated willingly ina flow ofdiscourse, some swimming withthe current while others struckout innewdirections. Lending and borrowing werethe very stuffofpoetry.1 The troubadours made formal imitation the principle of the sirventes, whilereserving formal innovationforthecanso; lessergenres divided between these two poles. It was only logical, then, that in their cosmopolitanage theyreacted withbothimitationand innovationto the poetic practices oftheircounterparts in neighboringcultures. Thisissueof Tenso will explore their reactions to, and interactions with, lyric poetry composed in French, Italian, and Galician-Portuguese.2 I How transparent was medieval culture? Among the expansionists wemaycount Ernst Robert Curtius, who, shortlyafterthe conflagration that was World War II, asserted his faith that medieval Romania, "the sumtotal ofthe countries in which Romance languages were spoken"— Romanian, Italian, French, Provençal, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese— had "acommunityofculture whichextendsacross language boundaries" (30-32). The unity ofRomaniahad been fundamentalto the conception ofGröber's Grundriss der romanischen Philologie (1 888-1 902), and was inherited by the ambitious but ill-fated Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters conceived by Hans Robert Jaussand Erich WILLIAM D. PADEN Köhler ( 1 968-93).3 Such broad horizons took a different form for the historian Fernand Braudel, who saw the Mediterranean as the centerofa communityofculture, a"living unity" markedby"identicalornear-identical worlds . . . found on the borders ofcountries as far apart and in general termsas different as Greece, Spain, Italy, NorthAfrica" (1 : 23 1). Asearlyasthe fifteenthcenturythe MinnesingerOswald vonWolkenstein boasted ofhiscompetence in ten languages ranging fromArabic in Spain to Russian in the East, and from German in the North to Italian in the South: französisch, mörisch, kationisch, und kastilian, teutsch, latein, windisch, lampertitsch, reuschisch undroman, die zehen sprach hob ich gebraucht, wenn mir zerrann. [French, Moorish(Arabic), Catalanand Castilian, German. Latin, Wendish, Lombardie (Italian), Russian and Romansch, These ten languages I have used when I needed to.4] Today suchexpansive visions inthepolitical sphere have led to the European Union, with its open bordersand prospects foracommoncurrency. Soon NATO, once a bulwark against the East, may take in Hungary, Poland, andthe Czech Republic.5 But the project ofthe GRLMA crashed against many obstacles, not least of them the advent of a new worldview which its advocates among medievalists have dubbed the "New Medievalism." For Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "On an epistemological level, what counts, perhaps more than the 'discovery' ofthe impossibility ofconceiving ofmedieval culture ormedieval literature asa 'unity' . . . , isourpresent unwillingness to totalize"(467). Wehaveturned ourattention increasinglytowardmarginalgroups , including inOccitanespeciallythetrobairitz, who had limited access, at best, to power and poetry.6 The historian R. I. Moore, studying the fate ofheretics, Jews, and lepers in medieval Europe, called it a "persecuting society." BOTH BORROWERAND LENDER It is a curious fact that the annals ofmedieval poetry record a singleJewishtroubadour who wrote inOccitan,just one Jewishlyricpoet in Galician-Portuguese, one in Italian, one in French, and one inGerman.7 Earlier scholars too easily celebrated what the Catalanscall convivencia, a spirit oftolerance, among Christians, Moslems, and Jews in Spain and in Occitania. Jews were often treated as outcasts byChristians. Jewish society nourishedpoetswithin itselfwho wroteonarangeofthemes—the Jewish "School ofProvence," in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, could count over 150 poets whose works we have orknow about—but produced no interaction with the poetry ofthe troubadours beyond a singletenso inwhich Guiraut Riquiermade roughfunofBonfilh.8 Elsewhere I havemade an argument about theAlbigensian Crusade whichrelates tangentially to the issues at stake here ("The Troubadours "). I claimedthatcontraryto widespread opinion, thecrusade should not beconsidered responsible for the end ofthetroubadourera, since, in spiteofthe devastationofwar, the veryregionwherethecrusadeconcentrated its fury, Languedoc, witnessed during the thirteenth century an economic boom, demographic growth, and an increasingnumberoftroubadours . The implication isthat wehave beenwrong to assume that such high-profile phenomenaasthe troubadours, ononehand, and thecrusade ontheothermust necessarily have interacted. Thenas now, the Midi was not sucha small place, but large enoughto containdiverse elements which need not have made contact. In this perspective medieval Occitania appears to have been neithertransparent nor opaque, but Balkanized, compartmentalized , diverse. So H was for Jews and troubadours, and so...