De Rougemont and the Arabic Influence Theory

“Can it be established that Arab poesy actually influenced cortezia? Renan wrote in 1863: “An abyss separates the form and spirit of Romance poetry from the form and spirit of Arab poetry.” Another scholar, Dozy, his contemporary, declares that Arab influence upon the troubadours has not been established “and it will not be.” Today his peremptory tone makes us smile. (How often has someone written that an abyss separates Cathars and troubadours and that my contention would never established…”)

Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. pg. 106

When Did Catharism Arise in Western Europe?

One of the main objections which many modern scholars put against any influence which Catharism may have exerted upon the Troubadours (besides the concrete assumption that it was already disproved thoroughly in the 1940s) is that the Troubadour’s were well-active by at least seventy years before the troubadours were present and active in Occitania.

“In more recent years, critics have tended to dismiss the possibility of a link between Catharism and troubadour verse, to the point where two new surveys of medieval Occitan poetry do not even bother to refute this notion.(referring to G.A. Bond and to Michael Routledge in Kay/Gaunt) Pierre Belperron and Henri Davenson argue that although the Cathars surfaced in the 1140s, the first troubadour with whose works we are familiar, Guilhem, the seventh count of Poitiers and the ninth duke of Aquitaine, preceded their appearance by seventy years and already demonstrated in his verses the characteristics that would later be considered most distinctive to troubadour lyric. Troubadours as important as Jaufre Rudel, Marcabru, and Bernart de Ventadorn likewise flourished well before the spread of heresy in this native land. In addition, these writers observe that whereas the Cathars would become most prominent in the regions of Toulouse, Carcassonne, and Foix, the first troubadours inhabited areas significantly to the north of those districts. Though both heretics and poets are present in medieval Occitania, their more precise temporal and geographical coordinates do not correspond. Even if their origins could be traced to the same time and place, no medieval sources attest to a connection between the Cathar heresy and troubadour lyric.”(Sullivan, Karen. Truth and the Heretic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. pg. 85)

However, and while he is probably not the most respected authority on this, de Rougemont raises some points that must be dealt with.

“The first troubadour, William of Poitiers, died in 1127. The earliest references to an organized and public Catharist Church date from 1160. But already in 1145, Catharism was found to have spread in Bulgaria and England! The name appears that year in Germany and two years later in Languedoc. Arno Borst infers that Catharism invaded Europe in a couple of years! He is surprised. I do not believe it. Under other names, or even without name, Catharism existed in people’s minds much earlier that ‘historical’ texts. Its doctrines were condemned in France as early as the eleventh century – at Orleans, in Poitou, Perigord, and Aquitaine; that is to say – and let us not fail to notice it – in the very places where the first troubadours appeared! “(Denis de Rougemont, pg. 83)

”
“Raimon V, Count of Toulouse and Suzerain of Languedoc, wrote in 1177: “the heresy has penetrated everywhere. It has sown discord in every family, dividing husband from wife, son from father, a man’s wife from his mother. Even priests yield to the temptation. The churches are abandoned and falling into ruin…The most important people on my estates have been corrupted. The crowd has followed their example and has given up the (Catholic) faith, so that I no longer dare to undertake anything.” How suggest that the troubadours lived and sang in such a world as is pictured there without caring what went on in the heads and hearts of the noblemen on whose bounty they lived? In reply to that question we are told that the first troubadours were seen in Poitou and the Limousin while the Heresy had its centre more to the southward – in the county of Toulouse. But we find that the language which the troubadours of the Limousin employed from the beginning is the language of the county of Toulouse! And the same language was soon being used by troubadours in other parts of Europe. ” (Denis de Rougemont, pg. ?)

Applying Dante’s formulation to modern Biases via G.A. Bond.

In considering the different influences and origins of the troubadour’s activities, one must consider not only source, but the possible range of effects resultant from that source. This is particularly important when attempting to recreate the complex social setting in which the troubadours lived and composed. Oversimplification here is devastating to the attempt to reconstruct the environment and motives driving these texts. Yet this is (other than anachronistically interpreting the modes and meanings of the various compositions on a primary level) the biggest hazard and temptation for the modern reader – critically inclined or otherwise.

“A second tacit bias is introduced into the question of origins by the relative weight accorded to the compositional elements of lyric. Dante’s well-known definition of troubadour poetry as fictio rethorica musicaque poita provides a useful illustration of the implications of this problem…each of the components included in his succinct definition – fiction, ornamentation, form – has its own theory and history (including a theory of origins). All three of these theories/histories are valid: they represent different analytic structures applied to the same complex phenomenon.” (Gerald A. Bond, Origins. from: Akehurst, F., and Judith Davis. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pg. 239.)

It is particularly important to keep this in mind when unraveling the various strands of cultural and “textual” influences. I have in mind here the Arabic thesis – where the textual impact can be clearly demonstrated, and similarities of metaphorical expression abound (amor de lonh, raqib, duettic role) the question of possible cultural influence must be dealt with carefully. Andalusian conventions may well have infiltrated and pleased the corts de Occitania, but they certainly did not supplant the deeply-seated Latinate Christianity nor the influence which the strong heretical presences had exerted there.

Applying this mode of criticism to the Arabic thesis, we can observe that although the sophisticated and artistically prodigious court-culture of Arabic Spain had its own thriving practices of lyric performance which often celebrated the themes of both Mystical and Secular Love(Bond, 243), and that there is a definite continuity at some level between the the Hispano-Arabic love poetry and the Provencal cansos d’amor which suggests some influence which would be unavoidable, the fact remains that Andalusi culture was not Provencal culture, and that Christendom and its heresies created a ground that was vastly removed from that of Islam.

So wherein lies the difference and sameness? In both conventions the distance of the lover and the unquenchable desire created by the same is an important theme to a majority of their respective love-poetries. However, the source of desire in the Arabian love-from-afar (which coincidentally appears to have entered their poetic tradition with the founding of the monotheism of Islam and the conscious recognition of a wholly transcendent deity) is usually based on a love once possessed which has been stolen away. The object being either an ideal desert maiden of either literal or religious significance, or almost as commonly, a young boy in a “Greek”-style pederastic relationship who has surpassed the point of maturity at which such a relationship can be sustained.

“The Arab Lady is commonly described as having a waist thin as a reed, emerging from hips ample as sand dunes; her mouth contains teeth like pearls, while its saliva is intoxicating as a potent wine; her face, which is likened either to a sun or to a full moon, reveals eyes gentle as a gazelle’s, yet which ruthlessly shoot arrows that penetrate the lover’s heart, thus wounding him fatally…For his part, the lover endures his lot, taking great pride in not blaming the Lady for the pain she causes him, even when driven to the point of madness or death. For all the world like a Cheshire cat, he wastes away from passion until his body is no longer visible, so that his presence may be detected only from the moans emanating from his empty clothes. “

“A substantial portion of Arabic love poetry is pederastic. As in the Greek tradition, here too the beloved is a beardless youth, and it is conventional for the relationship between boy and older lover to come to an end as soon as the boy reaches puberty and his beard begins to sprout.” (Jayyusi, Salma, and Manuela Marín. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.pg. 389)

The love-poetry of the Troubadours does display a yearning for a past age(???) but this is a cultural convention which is alluded to here, not a personage of either literal or personal significance. Also, the amor de lonh is usually a future object which has never been attained but is longed for, or as in the case of Jaufre Rudel, from a lover who has never met or even seen his beloved object of desire.

“Whereas in Provencal poetry the lover has normally never met the Lady he worships, and she, in turn, is unaware of his feelings for her, and often, of his very existence, Arabic love poetry is essentially one of separation; in the past, the lovers have indeed trysted and enjoyed the fruits of love; today, because the poet has been slandered by his enemies, the love union of the past, although it is fondly recalled, is no longer possible. Nonetheless, the poet continues to hope that the Lady will one day relent and grant him her favours once again; if not in this world, then in the afterlife. ” (Jayyusi, Salma, and Manuela Marín. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.pg. 389)

It is this sort of consideration of the impetus behind the fictio of the canso which must be carefully considered especially as the motives behind both feminist criticism and “partisans of the Arabic Thesis” which currently hold the dominant positions in scholarship of origins may easily fall subject to their initial biases to such a point that they fail to consider the full construct of the object presented to us by the troubadour artifacts. Salma Jayyusi and Marin Manuela show this kind of discretion as they consider the nature of Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its possible collisions with Provencal lyric. It is notable that this criticism of the Arabic thesis is coming from scholars of medieval Arabic literature, which seem to have a tendency to overplay their hand when it comes to establishing strains of influence upon western culture – the mitigated claim is refreshing to say the least.

“Today we are riding the crest of another wave of enthusiasm for the Arabic thesis. Nonetheless, the literary tradition, imagery and rhetorical conventions of Arabic poetry are significantly removed from those of medieval Romance poetry in several crucial respects. Hence, the partisans of Arabic origins would find themselves on firmer ground if they could account for the discrepancies, as well as the similarities, between the two traditions….it is indeed true that Provencal and part, though by no means all, of Arabic love poetry, share certain conventions, the most striking of which is the portrayal of the beloved as a distant and unattainable Lady, often addressed in the masculine form, whom the poet must serve faithfully but hopelessly. In Arabic, this convention is hardly Pagan, that is to say, it is not pre-Islamic. Instead, it developed soon agter the rise of Islam, while its major exponents were the Bedouin poets of the ‘Udhri school…From the Quranic ideas and vocabulary employed by these poets, it does seem clear that the relationship of a faithful lover to a single Lady, whom he was fated to love eternally, was shaped by the new monotheistic religion revealed by the Prophet…Nevertheless, the stock imagery employed in these portrayals is very different from that used in Romance. ” (Jayyusi, Salma, and Manuela Marín. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.pg. 388)

Where “Troubador” Comes From.

“…the poets to whom we owe this art called themselves by specific terms that, in Occita, French, Italian, and Spanish, are derived from the verbs trobad, trouver, trovare, trovar, and go back to musical composition (from the medieval Latin tropare ‘to make tropes’, a trope being “a newly composed text with music added to an established liturgical chant.”

(Akehurst, F., and Judith Davis. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pg. 12, 13.)

Denomy and the Essential Ennobling Trait of Early Courtly Love.

“Courtly Love is a type of sensual love and what distinguishes it from other forms of sexual love, from mere passion, from so-called Platonic love, from married love is its purpose or motive, its formal object, namely, the lover’s progress and growth in natural goodness, merit and worth.”

-Denomy, Courtly Love, pg. 44

Lewis, de Rougemont, and Modern Scholarship of Courtly Love

Lewis and de Rougemont are sometimes dismissed wholly or partially from recent studies of Courtly Love on the basis that they were too willing to find simple causes for the complex event that was the Troubadours and their audience. To state it as simply as possible, both Lewis and de Rougemont characterized the invention of passionate love in the west as being the result of Christian ideals encountering still-pagan cultures, thus yielding a new hybrid of passion, idealization and sensuality that altogether constituted a new sentiment within the western mind. This hardly looks like a recipe for over-simplification if one takes into account the breadth of Lewis’s readings in medieval literature or de Rougemont’s humility in acknowledging the sometimes unknown gulf of causae standing between himself and the spiritual and emotional developments he was attempting to describe and diagnose in his Love in the Western World. Both authors are aware that there are a sea of “causes” at work behind the phenomena and developments they describe, but they are sometimes slighted for the big pictures that emerge from the minutiae of their more critical scholarly work.

Both de Rougemont and Lewis are well-known for drawing attention to the appearance of courtly love and in doing so defining some of the limits and tone of the academic discourse that followed, but often ignored is their full acknowledgment that no one cause could solely carry the weight of explaining the appearance. De Rougemont stated clearly that the “causes” which he focused on, specifically Catharism, were not textual, but socio-political; those that had shaped the landscape from which Courtly Love had emerged, rather than textually influencing the poets themselves.

Lewis also makes clear that “Ovid Misunderstood” and “Northern Influence” are, at best, possible contributing factors rather than monocephalous explanations for the mystery of the origins of fin’amor. Likewise for de Rougemont, his posited thesis about Catharism stands in such opposition to Aroux, Peladan and Otto Rahn that it can not only not be identified with the maximum thesis that the trobar clus was the “secret language of heresy,” but also that it cannot be identified with a even minimal version of the same. De Rougemont appealed to the widespread influence of Catharism and it’s anti-Christian elements as being a fundamental element of the motivations for the audience of troubadour activities, rather than the slanderous dismissal that he was presuming an occultic and esoteric explanation for what he well knew to be a complex social and artistic movement.

The Upper and Lower Conceptual Limits of Fin’Amor

“Fin’amor coincides with modern notions of romantic love only to a degree. At the root of both medieval and modern romantic sentiments lies sexual attraction between man and woman. The modern reader finds nothing hard to understand in Bernart de Ventadorn’s hope that his lady might

“Receive me in that place
She lies in, to embrace
And press against me, tight,
Her, body smooth and white.

The Comtessa de Dia expresses much the same longing for her “naked knight.” While most troubadours sublimate love to some extent, Eros never completely loses his vitals. When love has been spiritualized to the degree of, say, Dante’s feelings for Beatrice, who guided him toward heaven, we have transcended the limits of fin’amor and risen into the realm of a more purely religious emotion.”(Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours By Robert Kehew – pages from introduction)

Otto Rahn and the Impression of Having Touched the Heart of the Problem.

Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has sometimes been credited with linking Catharism with Courtly Love, and doing so on an insufficient basis. In response to this, and the suppression that has resulted from the misreading of his thesis concerning the Cathars, de Rougemont pointed out the actual source for the theory in its extreme form was Otto Rahn – a bit of a wing nut.

“It all started in 1937 with the publication of La Croisade contre la Graal by Otto Rahn, a young German fascinated by Montsegur, where he thinks he recognizes the castle of the Grail, and who died mysteriously in an alpine waste near Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. His two extreme theses are taken from Eugene Aroux and the Sâr Péladan :

1) All troubadours were Cathars, all Cathars were troubadours’; and

2) courtly language was the secret language of heresy.

While this is untenable, it evokes an obscure evidence, the impression of having touched , albeit gropingly, the heart of the problem, and that somehow, in the fundamental reality of symbol, one burns. “(Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. pg. 329.)

Distancing himself from this extreme thesis while still acknowledging the appeal of such a mystical and unified “cause” for Courtly Love, de Rougemont outlines his more realistic form of this thesis which is much more than a simple downgraded form of the original. Rahn’s thesis outrightly, and without support, maintained that the trobar clus was the “secret language of heresy.” By noticing this and understanding its appeal, de Rougemont was poorly understood to have been in favor of this kind of foolhardy doctrinairian approach to social and literary history. However, rather than seeking simple cause, de Rougemont contended that Catharism and the Troubadours shared such a conspicuous concurrency geographically, chronologically, and socially that Troubadour activity cannot be fully understood without a consideration of the serious force that Catharism exerted upon its breeding grounds.

“This was as easy to cite in a gossip column as to refute in a specialized journal, without touching upon my real thesis, which remains: that troubadours and Cathars cannot be understood separately, outside of the broad religious – or psychosocial – phenomenon which includes them and carries them from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Anyone who claims that these two movements occurring at the same time and in the same regions, provinces and castles, exposed to the same sworn enemies, and both condemned by the Church, have ‘nothing in common’, must carry the burden of proof.” (Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. pg. 331-332.)

Guillem de Peiteus

William VII, count of Poitiers, ninth duke of Aquitaine. The first troubadour whose works survive.

“The count of Poitiers [Guillem de Peiteus] was one of the greatest gallants the world has known and a great deceiver of ladies, and a good knight in arms and generous in love; and could write and sing well. And he went about the world a great while fooling ladies. And he had a son, who took to wife the duchess of Normandy, who had a daughter [Eleanor of Aquitaine] who was wife to King Henry of England, mother of the Young King and of lord Richard and of the Count Jaufre of Brittany”

Towards a foreign likeness bent, translation of excerpt of the Vida of Guillem de Peiteus, pg. 59.

Sociological vs. Textual Influence -Source vs. Motive (from G.A. Bond)

A final note from G.A. Bond on direction of research and methodology as informed by reading Courtly literature properly –

“An alternative direction of research looks to sociological factors for the origins of courtly love. It does not necessarily contradict the textual theses outlined above, but prefers to locate primary motivation in social rather than textual processes. One branch of the investigation concentrates on the courtly lover and his desire, while a second explores the role of the lady. Both examine the question from the standpoint of the consuming group rather than that of the producing individual, asking less about the sources of fin’amor than about its motives, less about material than about efficient cause.”
Gerald A. Bond, Origins. from: Akehurst, F., and Judith Davis. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pg. 245.

Caveats of the Arabic/Courtly Thesis from G.A. Bond

In his essay “Origins,” Gerald Bond largely unseats the theory that the distinctives of fin’amor arose from Arabic influence. This thesis has been fairly popular and has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention(beginning perhaps with A.J. Denomy who attributed a possible influence to Avicenna and co.) and Bond deals with both the attraction to this thesis and its caveats.

Speaking of the attractions to the thesis, he writes:

“The Court culture of eleventh-century Arabic Spain was by all accounts brilliant, sophisticated, and particularly interested in artistic creation. Furthermore, secular as well as mystical love was a frequent topic of both lyric and didactic works; theories of profane love had been well worked out before 1100. Motifs (such as the need for secrecy), styles (such as difficult composition), and concepts (such as the raqib or “guard”) similar or identical to those of troubadour poetry appear in the amorous verse of Muslim Spain. Reading such parallels as proof of influence, many scholars have asserted that the troubadours derived their main impulses from Arabic sources.(Boase 62-75; Menocal)”

But for it’s difficulties he has this to say:

“It is certainly possible that the Muslim culture exerted a general influence on such areas as chivalry and courtliness(Nelli) and perhaps even on the social role of versemaking. This general and passive influence would have been the routine result of the interactions between the cultures brought about by the various activities of the Christian courts of Northern Spain, which became increasingly powerful and wealthy as the eleventh century progressed. But specific and willful influences are less easily accepted.”

More specifically, Bond, goes on to address the three main caveats:

1) They(Spanish/Arabic sources) would have had to have been assimilated by Occitan courts already by the time the first known troubadour began writing in the early years of the twelfth century.

2)While there was very little interaction between the courts, most of the “interaction” was due to the very successful and lucrative(to the Spanish) invasions – thereby, as Bond puts it: “hardly conducive to imitation.”

3) Perhaps most importantly(which is fairly important if it is more important that “there was no communication between Occitan and Arabic culture…”) is that “even the most lettered among the troubadours(especially the early ones) did not understand Arabic, and nothing is known to have been translated.”

Gerald A. Bond, Origins. from: Akehurst, F., and Judith Davis. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pg. 242-43.

Songs vs. Poems – Gerald A. Bond and Modern Perceptions of Troubadour literature

Gerald A. Bond, in his essay, Origins, points out that modern scholars and students examining Troubadour literature make assumptions about the nature of the songs that constitute the troubadour catalog by treating them as poetry instead.

“When we speak of the “poet,” silently read a text, or even number the lines in an edition, we take a strong position concerning its discursive status. We see the artifact as a stable, written and verbal composition subject to the categories of evaluation and criticism developed in antiquity (and revived across the High Middle Ages) for “poetry.” But the troubadour product can be called properly a “poem” only when it is reduced to its verbal component, fixed within a timeless language, and framed by the preconceptions engendered by the book that contains it. When not in such a state, it is a song – that is, an artifact embedded in a living culture apparently governed to a large extent by the characteristics of Ong’s “secondary orality.”(note to self: according to Ong, the sounds of secondary orality are produced by technological creations which can themselves be made only by means of knowledge and skills developed through the use of writing and reading.)

He goes on to point out that the “suddenness” of the origins of Troubadour poetry may be illusory to some extent as is the apparent need for a monocephalous external explanation for its appearance. Bond then points to the rise in literacy as a possible source for some of this illusion that must be explained and accounted for in order to understand how sudden the rise of Troubadour literature actually was.

“…the suddenness is not limited to troubadour poetry and may reflect rather the relatively rapid change in the means of and attitude towards preserving documents of all kinds, public as well as private. The equally sudden appearance of “personal” letters or “personal” poetry in Latin in this period supports the conclusion that the whole phenomenon of documentation, particularly of “personal” texts, underwent a relatively rapid change throughout the elite culture. From this perspective, we need to account less for the sudden rise than for the sudden preservation of the lyric – a very different question indeed.”( Gerald A. Bond, Origins. from: Akehurst, F., and Judith Davis. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pg. 238-9)

In both these and Bond’s other points, practical considerations must be taken to remove ourselves and our 800 years of literate traditions from the reading of the Troubadours in order to even begin to understand how big a shift in sensibility it actually was or wasn’t. We have to remove the “modern” from the lens.