The Loss of Love's Emotions:

The Urban Consistori and the reconceptualization of the Court’s Love Lyric 

          Melancholic, suffering, lost in a state far from reason and commanded by the inconsistent emotions of love, the composer of the courtly love lyric offers the listener an image of love’s capacity to overpower through intense sensation.  The courtly milieu of the twelfth century revered its access to this world of emotions through the  musical performance of its jongleurs and troubadours.  In the fourteenth century the song enters the city streets.  It is first six bourgeois and one damoiseau of Toulouse and then two poets and a King in Barcelona that seek to encourage singing emotions in the city with a contest.  The call to compose is announced in 1323 by the Consistori de la subregaya companhia del Gai Saber of Toulouse and in 1393 by the Consistori de la Gaya Ciència in Barcelona.

            When in Toulouse seven lovers of lyric send out a letter to all the poets who might compete in the jocs florals, the realm of love lyric shifts space from the court to the city.  The literature of fin’ amor had already waned throughout the courts of southern France.  Why were men from the city seeking to revive an art that had flourished and waned in a courtly setting?  The culture of the city cannot allow a simple transplantation into its soil of this courtly product.  The implications of such a desire are great; the maneuvering of such a feat telling.  Our work examines the transformations that were necessary in the move from twelfth-century courtly society to the urban environment of the fourteenth century.  In particular, we concentrate on the role of emotions and composition in the production of a text as they were understood first by the troubadours and then the Consistori.

The notions of power and powerlessness will serve to illustrate in what way shifts occur in the conceptualization of literary production as this production moves from one milieu to another.  The intense emotional content of the poetry produced in troubadour lyric was the literature’s defining feature from early on.  Bernart de Ventadorn claims himself to be the best of the poets for his songs come from his heart-- that is they are the product of the varied and powerful emotions Love and his domna impose on him.  Jeanroy allowed the implications of the poet’s claim to stand when he stated that Bernard’s work was great because it was “sincere.”  It is Love’s power that determines the quality of a work.  The reward the poet seeks is a display of emotion from his domna.  The notions at work here could not be more different from those proposed by the Consistori. 

The Consistori of Toulouse and that of Barcelona are born of concerns foreign to those that produced the love lyric of the first troubadours.  Guilhem Molinier in the Leys d’amors says the “gay science” not only instructs one to write well, but also teaches the ignorant and restrains the mad or foolish lover.  It also allows one to live in joy and happiness and to escape ennui and sadness.  The focus is on the effects of the finished product; the emotions are found in a work’s impact, not in its conception.  In composition it is not emotion that is rewarded, but technique, and this not by the affection of a woman, but with the gold or silver trinket of an institution.  In situating the Consistori of the city within the ideological currents circulating in the early fourteenth century, I will disclose why the emotions of love were banished from the literature of the city’s floral games.

Full article in Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th-16th century). Ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjarding and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene.  Studies in European Urbana History 5.  Turnout, Belgium: Brepols, 203-223.