Forewords:
The paper below is memorable. This is because it is the first academic writing in my previous university life. Viewing the paper from today, although the English is no good, and the expressions is overwording, I still like it very much, not only of ideas but also the first success of developing my thinking pattern.
Article:
The Affective World of Troubadour’s Song:
A symbol of the relief from religious restraint
From
time to time, the artistic value of poem not lies in the elegance and
sensuous words, but rather, the idea or symbol concealed
behind these words. In a similar way, what the troubadours, a group of poet-musicians from the aristocratic
class of France active from the 11th to 12th century,
leaves to the world is a treasure of heartfelt, profound and consummate affectionate musical works.
Although this affection is somewhat idealistic and unattainable, its influence is
still far reaching till to many centuries, constituting part of what is now called
European humanistic culture. It was in the 11th century that the
troubadours first began to appear. The combination of the ‘Heroic Chivalry’ and
the ideal ‘Courtly Love’ that they contributed found expression in the daily
words and deeds of the medieval people. The first troubadour of record was Duke
William of Aquitaine.
His poetry is said to contain all elements of ‘Courtly Love’, a kind of lovely
affection commonly reflected in many troubadours’ poems. The nature of 'Courtly Love' is rather ambivalent, sometimes positive
and joyful, but sometimes melancholic and miserable. Although many of the
extant troubadour poems exalt the pure and passionate affection of the ‘Courtly Love’
between a gentleman and a courtly lady in the surface, such passions, however, always give evidence of presenting somewhat the
religious symbolism as a personal emotional reaction to the social/liturgical orders and codes beneath. In the following
discussion, I shall examine the affective world of troubadours through their songs
and lyrics, especially seeking the underlying tones of the words, so as to
reveal how the ‘Courtly love’, was shaped and shaped the medieval musical culture.
It
is almost impossible for us to understand the symbolism of the troubadours’
poetry without referring to the culture and religious situation in the Middle
Ages. Medieval people lived under a restrained world of codes and rules.
Treaties, guidance, manners, no matter on chivalry, on hunting, on table, on
liturgy, subliminally directed their daily life. In addition, the Catholic
Church acted as the ministry of God’s representative on earth. It was the sole
means of maintaining the divine, godly, order of the terrestrial world
regardless of her ‘greedy zeal’ in accumulating their prestige and wealth
incessantly. The Church doctrine and liturgy not only gave coherence but also
restraints to everyday life.
The
promise of salvation, the soul’s redemption from sin and its eternal life in a
world to come, for instance, was assured by the Church through the ways of burdensome
sacraments. No matter is the ‘Ladder
of Salvation’ of the wall painting of Chaldon Church, or the ‘Ladder of
Perfection’ by Whicker, gives the impression of how a medieval individual
should put in effort for the whole life but still wore an entire face of fear
and uncertainty in the last judgment before the awe-inspiring God. The rooted religious
affection of the poets, therefore, like the common medieval people, unavoidably
was a contradictive amalgamation of anxiety and devotion, as well as
desperation and piousness. It is because of these underlying negative emotions
that rooted unconsciously in the mind of the troubadours, the ‘Courtly Love’
that flourished in their poems becomes a kind of substituted and transformed
affection, becoming a relief from the liturgical rigidities. In this sense, the
poems of troubadour comprise religious symbolism.
According to the Webster’s Third New
International Dictationary, the word ‘relief’ means that an feeling of removal
or lightening or setting free of something burdensome, painful or distressing.
One of the ways to remove the stress of the afflicting emotion, in general
speaking, is to let the negative affection substituted by another positive one.
In the daily experience, for instance, consoling by good friends or enjoying a
nice trip can always assist to calm down, or to relieve from the vigorous and
agitated emotions after the quarrel between a couple of lovers. It is because
the negative affection is overcame, or substituted, by some positive affection.
The same thing happens in the poems of the troubadours. It is obvious that the
troubadour song presented a kind of love so-called ‘Feudalization’ of love. The
lady was called ‘midons’ or ‘senhor’. Only a bad lord refused to protect and
aid his vassal with pity. In some poetry of the troubadours, the lady is
depicted as so lofty and unapproachable, somewhat like the God in certain ways,
that the lover in aspiring to her is like a lesser, humiliate knight seeking a
seat by a mighty baron. It can be imagined that a
medieval man who was zealous, heartfelt and devout but could not touch even the
corner of the “Ladder of Salvation’. Where his affection could be released? It
is not surprised to assert that the loyalty or honesty between the lord and the
vassal in the feudal society resembled the dedicated love towards God. The more
the man dedicated loyally as a serf to his lord, the ‘midons’, the more the man
felt relief from the restricted emotion because of the more acceptance from the
lord. In Pus Vezem, Guilhem of Poitou, also named William of Anquitane,
stated:
Flowering fields again we see, the meadows rich with greenery, the
springs all rippling lucidly, the wind, the breeze
With every man that joy should be, which brings him ease…………
Obedience he must not spurn,
Bowing to many. In his turn he must do pleasant deeds to earn
The love he has to sought.
Yes, like a serf he now must learn silence in court………
Interestingly,
‘Feudalisation of Love’ consists of certain elements of what is said to be
called ‘Courtly Love’. The poet is about a serf and how he feels if he could
gain more freedom from the rigid and aloof world by showing absolute obedience
to the lady in regardless of whatever the pain brought. The rising of love is
linked with the spring. The lady is the most beautiful in the world and the
poet is submissive to her power. With releasing of his
obedient love, poet seems to gain the freedom from his restrained affection
world, in the other word, from the very hypocritical and superficial religious
orders, and those sacraments. Through the use of feudal metaphor in
troubadour’s poem, the negative, unrequited affection towards God was
substituted by a kind of positive and rewarding feudalized fidelity, though
deriving from poets’ imagery, was still a way of passionate relief. In fact,
troubadours showed no pretence of worshipping aloofness. They really wanted the
consummating embrace. But not all the idealistic love in the poems give a
perfect result from their ‘Midons’, or the lady.
Undeniably,
many of the ‘Courtly love’ ideas presented in the poems flourishes with grief,
sorrow and disappointment. To love is to suffer, and even it associates with
distressing physical symptoms such as an inability to eat or sleep. The tenets of such love
requires a knight to prove his love for his lady by performing courageous, and
often impossible deeds; he must even be willing to die for her. If this kind of
affection is another form of affection to substitute the rigid and unfulfilled
Christian love, we can understand why when Pope Urban II proclaimed for the
bloody crusade in 1095A.D.,
albeit irrational, the response was a tremendous success that totally exceeded
his expectation. However, what remaining nowadays is only a horrible and bloody
historical record of mankind.
In
the troubadour’s song of ‘Distant Lady’, the religious symbolism in the poetry,
again, is obvious. The troubadour secularizes this highly self-devoted,
vassal-like or even serf-like affection believing that the lesser he asserted
his own will, the more he accepted by the lady, that is, he was closer to the
top of the ‘Salvation Ladder’. Jaufre Rudel,
undoubtedly, depicts us a clear picture of the writer’s devout affection, his
inner intense religious love and how it is sublimated and realized into the
metaphorical feudal affection towards his ‘Lady’. The ‘Distant Lady’ in the
song can be every woman truly loved and loving. The separation is not meant
that she is unreal or unattainable but, on the other hand, it is the aim in
life to seek or to discover, no matter for the poet or for the others. Rudel
wrote:
When now the days are long
in May,
I love to hear the birds far
distant,
And when the song has died
away,
I dream about a love as distant………..
Sad and rejoicing I shall part
from her,
When I have seen this love
far away:…………
He speaks the truth who I says
I crave
And go desiring this love far
away
For no other joy
pleases me more,
For my godfather
gave me this fate
Than the rich enjoyment of this love far away……….
In
a more concrete sense, Rudel’s poem shows us that seeking for the Courtly Love
from the distant ‘Lady’ is the seeking for the love, or the pity from the angry
God. The more he suffered in the course of seeking, the more godly devotion he
had sacrificed, and thus, another way of relief of his onerous affection. This
might be the aim in life of the poet, to some extent, the aim in life of every
medieval man
in order to fulfill the unsatisfied religious heart.
As
we have seen that how the metaphoric ‘Feudal Love’ or ‘Courtly Love’ plays an
important role in troubadours’ poem and is related with their religious
affection, it is interested to point out that the cult of the Virgin Mary in
the High Middle Ages is also another factor affecting their underlying emotion
of the poems. Ironically, Christianity succeeded ultimately in this period
because it represented a return to the pagan way of worshipping the original
goddess which devotion to the Roman gods or ancient earthly goddess had
precluded though the Church had attempted to stamp out previously. The
importance of the adoration of the ‘Mother of Heaven’ was not only meant that
the rank of the woman, at least in the middle class, was exalted, but also the
rigidities of fear underlying the medieval world-views dominated by the concept
and image of God’ s harsh judgment, was gradually broken down. The adoration of
the Virgin, therefore, satisfied some of the attitudes that went to the
troubadour system with its worship of the ‘Lady’. In a more progressive sense,
the ‘Feudal Lady’ in the poem of troubadour is now transformed into Virgin Mary
who was defined as a human character that could really temper justice with
mercy, even with a warm or a merciful smile. On the other hand, Virgin Mary,
the intercessor for the salvation of wicked human soul, tended to be humanized.
She was seen as a real, fleshy and attainable human of tenderness and
compassion. No matter is the ‘Goddess’ transformed to “Lady’ or vice versa, the
restrained religious affection is relieved through this religious symbolization
process. In poem of Bernart De Ventadorn, the ‘Lady’ is transformed to become
the Virgin Mary, Goddess of love, mercy and pity. The ‘God-liked Lady’ is all
beautiful and amiable. She lifts all worshippers including the poet himself up
to passionate perfection and completeness and never lets down his hopes. The
poem states:
This love wounds me so gentle
In the heart with sweet savor
A hundred times a day I die of
grief
And revive with joy another
hundred………
good will be the reward after
suffering
All the gold
silver in the world
I would have
given, if I had it
Provided my lady
might know
How truly I love
her………
When I see her,
it certainly shows
In my eyes, my
face, my color
For I tremble
with fear, like the leaf in the wind
I haven’t the
judgement of a child
So overwhelmed am I love
And toward a man who is thus vanquished
A lady could show
great pity……….
Ventadorn
obviously expressed the devotion of a knightly servant to the ‘Lady’, but in
one aspect as we have seen, the energies that had alienated into God struggling
for salvation had been drawn to the ‘Lady’, a ‘God-liked Lady’ that was more
attainable, more perfect and even more human-liked. In a more ridiculous way,
the image that appeared before the poet’s eyes when he prayed was his human
‘Lady’, not the angry God swaying to and fro in acceptance of salvation.
On
the other hand, in the song of Guiraut Riquier, Humils, forfaitz, repress e
penedens, we explicitly find that the previous concentrations of love on
the feudal ‘Midons’ turned to the Goddess Mary requesting for mercy and
redemption. The Goddess, ‘Virgin Mary’, was transformed to become a humanized
person, a real person in life that was more sensuous and attainable. He
definitely wrote:
Humble, guilty, accused and repentant,
Saddened, unhappy to return,
I am, for I have lost my time on account of
sin,
I beg mercy, lady, gracious Virgin,
Mother of Christ,
son of the all-power, that you take no account of my sin towards you,
If it pleases you, consider the need of my
miserable soul………….
Again,
in another song of Riquier, he begged for love and pardon even more honestly.
His poem Be.m degra de chantar tener states:
I should certainly refrain from singing,
For to song, happiness is fitting,
And worry constrains me so much
That it causes pain from all sides,……………..
My sense, my joy, my displeasure
My pain and my profit truly
For I scarcely say anything else good………
With a great umber of setbacks
From which it seems that He is against us
On account of disordered desire
And overweening power………
Lady, mother of charity,
Secure for us, out of pity,
From your son, redeemer,
Goddess
Mary is humanized in the poem. This upsurge of deep pagan elements that revived
popularly in the medieval period was returned to the hands of Troubadours’. The
expression of the poet’s deep and pious devotion of Mother of Heaven was now
turned towards his ‘Humanized Lady’. He was requesting for mercy, for
redemption, even for the salvation. The goal of joy after
redemption, seen as the motive force of love, is interpreted in terms of poet’s
experience as he offered his devotion in the face of setback and
disappointment. The previous unattainable desires for the religious affection
of satisfaction are fulfilled through his own created ‘Virgin Mary’, a
humanized Goddess.
In conclusion, it is because of this kind of
substituted or transformed lovely affection, the ‘Feudal Love’ or ‘Courtly
Love’, relieves the troubadour poets from the restrained religious affliction.
Perhaps, this may be the reason why the music of the troubadour was so popular
in the Middle Ages. The echo was clear. Whether the influences are directly or
indirectly, the ideas of pure love lauded by nobility and idolized by the
troubadours spread rapidly and extensively like diseases. Under the influence, Tristram
and Ysolt, Wace’s Brut and the romance of Troy were written. Andress Capellanus,
furthermore, viewed ‘Courtly Love’ which embraced in the affection world of the
troubadours’ poetries, as an art of rules and he regulated these rules into his
remarkable work of The Art of Courtly Love. Whether this work is
satirical, sincere, or debatable is not the most important. Its recognition is
nevertheless the golden testament of love to all medieval people. It is also
regarded as the incipient of the ‘Romance Love’, which is the most essential
love culture of the European world.
The impact of the troubadours’ poems, however, was far
beyond this limit. We find that more and more the secular used the religious
symbolism that prevailed in troubadours’songs. Chretiende Troyes took over a
great deal of the religious vocabulary and turned it to the use of sensual
love. Love was adoration. In Gottfried’s Tristan of the early thirteen
century there was a Cave
of Lovers described as a
richly adorned church with its shrine. In the center was ‘the nest of
crystalline Love’ with design and proportions explained after the modes of the
Gothic World.
As the time passed, more and more different kinds of sculptures, literatures,
poems reflected in religious symbolism, and even frequently, gave evidence of
hostility, or fierce attack on the social inequity and corrupted Church and
thus, enforced the reformation of the Church. The poets, the artists tended to
express their personal ideas and affection, at the same time, release their
religious or social restrained emotions through their artistic activities.
Therefore, through the contribution of the troubadours’ music and their ways of
discharging the affection by using religious symbolism, it is undeniable to
assert that the most precious and valuable lyric poetry in Western humanistic culture
begins with the ‘Troubadour’.
Bibliography:
Andrea
Hopkins, The Passionate Code of the Troubadours, New
York: Harper San
Francisco 1994.
Fiero Gloria K., The Humanistic Tradition: Medieval Europe
and the World Beyond, 2nd ed., Singapore: Brown & Benchmark
Publishers, 1995
Lindsay
Jack, The Troubadours and Their World, London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1976.
David Leung (theorydavid)
2013-10-12 Published
